ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book introduces the project and addresses key theoretical concepts, while also situating the book within recent scholarship on the interrelations between musical and textual meaning-making, and developing the key concept for the study, that of the acoustic self. It presents two modes of constructing the acoustic self through a fugal structure. The book then focuses strictly on narratives employing Beethoven’s music, it will show that the history of listening to Beethoven is as important as his music itself in these novels. It also tackles another awe-inspiring composer, Richard Wagner. The role of Wagner in English modernist literature has been widely explored, yet his influence has been scarcely connected to the semiotics of the subject.
