From her unique standpoint as singer-songwriter-scholar, Polly Paulusma examines the influences of Carter’s 1960s folk singing, unknown until now, on her prose writing. Recent critical attention has focused on Carter’s relationship with folk/fairy tales, but this book uses a newly available archive containing Carter’s folk song notes, books, LPs and recordings to change the debate, proving Carter performed folk songs. Placing this archive alongside the album sleeve notes Carter wrote and her diaries and essays, it reimagines Carter’s prose as a vehicle for the singing voice, and reveals a writing style imbued with ‘songfulness’ informed by her singing praxis.
Reading Carter’s texts through songs she knew and sang, this book shows, from influences of rhythm, melodic shape, thematic focus, imagery, ‘voice’ and ‘breath’, how Carter steeped her writing with folk song’s features to produce ‘canorography’: song-infused prose. Concluding with a discussion of Carter’s profound influence on songwriters, focusing on the author's interview with Emily Portman, this book invites us to reimagine Carter’s prose as audial event, dissolving boundaries between prose and song, between text and reader, between word and sound, in an ever-renewing act of sympathetic resonance.
Preface 1 Introduction 2 ‘A Singer’s Swagger’: Angela Carter, the Folk Singer 3 ‘Me and Not-Me’: Folk Song Praxis and the Gender Imaginary in Shadow Dance 4 ‘An Invented Distance’: Folk Songs, Sonic Geographies, and The Erl-King’s Greenwood 5 ‘Moving Through Time’: Folk Songs, Journeys and the Picaresque in ‘Reflections’ and The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman 6 ‘Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage’: Folk Songs, Avianthropes and the Canorographic Voice in ‘The Erl-King’ and Nights at the Circus 7 ‘A Continued Thread’: Angela Carter and the Folk Singer Emily Portman 8 Sympathetic Resonances Bibliography
Polly Paulusma is an independent scholar and professional musician based in the UK. Please visit her website www.pollypaulusma.com to know more about her work.
Reviews for Angela Carter and Folk Music: 'Invisible Music', Prose and the Art of Canorography
In Angela Carter and Folk Music: ‘Invisible Music’, Prose and the Art of Canorography, Paulusma offers us a rigorous blueprint for this new enquiry. In clear yet entertaining prose, discussions are made with precision and concision, and her burgeoning theory underpins each topic of debate so there is no tangential waywardness. This is a tantalizing proposal for Carter and music-literary scholars alike. * Folk Music Journal * This illuminating and innovative study offers fresh and original perspectives on the work of one of the most influential and widely-discussed British writers of the twentieth century - Angela Carter. Bringing new critical attention to a formative but under-examined period of her life, it explores Carter’s contribution to the British Folk revival of the 1960s and its impact on her early work. Original archival research and musicological analysis combine to make a compelling case for the origins and significance of ‘songfulness’ in Carter’s writing. This book will be essential reading for Angela Carter’s many admirers. * Rachel Carroll, Reader in English in the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Law, Teesside University, UK *
