ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 addresses the key theoretical concepts of the study, while also positioning the book within recent scholarship on the interrelations between musical and textual meaning-making, and developing the central concept for the study, that of the acoustic self. With a strong focus on musical semiotics, the chapter establishes the book’s musico-literary perspective. I spotlight musical meaning-making, and employ further theories and criticism in the analyses of the novels in subsequent chapters. In this chapter, I also clarify the central focus on English modernism and my main emphasis on works by Aldous Huxley, E.M. Forster, and Virginia Woolf—each of whom employed music as a method in their narratives.
