Novel Sounds

This is an original and subtle book, with punk-rock ricochets. -- Greil Marcus
Every chapter of Novel Sounds works at a high and steady pitch of intelligence and cogency. Florence Dore's work teems with rich archival unearthings and interpretive ingenuity. Dore's intricate connections, juxtapositions, and analyses of multimedia interanimation are never less than absorbing and are often eye-opening both at the level of textual forms and in the larger terms of cultural understanding in which they were embedded. -- Eric Lott, author of Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism
In Florence Dore's electrifying, genre-busting tour de force, the mid-twentieth-century inventors of literary formalism, tracing poetic tradition to the ballad form, inadvertently open literature's floodgates to encompass the bold 'novel sounds' of rock 'n' roll. Southern fiction, no less than American culture, would never be the same. -- Jennifer Fleissner, Indiana University-Bloomington
Novel Sounds is a brilliantly literary account of rock and roll and American culture. From Lead Belly at the MLA to Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize, Dore demonstrates how profoundly and unexpectedly entwined our literary histories are with their sonic media. She ensures we'll never listen to a ballad or read a novel from the era in the same way again. -- Kate Marshall, University of Notre Dame
In Novel Sounds, Dore is interested in how a mass cultural phenomenon like rock 'n' roll can help illuminate realities about institutionalized high culture. Beginning with the case of Lead Belly, she traces the low and high cultural currents that the folk singer helped set in motion, specifically the mass popularization of Southern black music as 'rock 'n' roll' and the intellectual enthusiasm for folk ballads. -- Max McKenna * PopMatters *
A stimulating addition to the literature on southern American fiction. * Choice *
A pleasing option for readers who enjoy celebrated music writers like [Greil] Marcus or Peter Guralnick. * Chapter 16 *