Street Songs: Writers and Urban Songs and Cries, 1800–1925 by Daniel Karlin

Abstract

MLR, .,   of the connection between Edgar Allan Poe and information theory, or Justine S. Murison on Martin Van Buren’s relationship to party politics. Many of the essays refer to popular anthologies for undergraduates, especially e Norton Anthology of American Literature, which have cemented what Robert S. Levine calls ‘microperiods’ (pp. –). While most references to anthologies call attention to the elisions and artificial barriers these anthologies produce, Levine provides a compelling counterpoint, suggesting that the traditional divisions allow critics and their students to ‘illuminate important connections between authors and their historical moment’ (p. ). e collection is varied enough for one to imagine this statement in tension with Russ Castronovo’s argument, which avers that consideration of literature’s transmission across time and space is at least as important as examining its original context. I read Timelines of American Literature with great pleasure, for the essays not only abound in valuable insights but are also written in clear prose. While I share Levine’s sense that the book would not be useful for undergraduates—the disturbing of timelines seems to require a sense of extant timelines in the first place—the collection is invaluable for any academics who think self-consciously about their work in relation to history, politics, or economics. It avoids the Manichaeism of much writing on periodization and instead shows the persisting fertility of literary history. M S U J G Street Songs: Writers and Urban Songs and Cries, –. By D K. (Clarendon Lectures in English) Oxford: Oxford University Press. . xii+  pp. £. ISBN ––––. Daniel Karlin’s slim volume expands his  Clarendon lectures into an elegant discussion of the presence of street songs in nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury poetry and fiction. Karlin offers no general arguments (about the work of music in literature, for example, or the role of street songs in particular), but rather the evidence of a series of closely observed cases, in each of which a writer transforms an ‘appropriation’ to make it part of a literary work’s ‘symbolic’ or ‘artistic design’ (pp. , , ). is leaves plenty of room for what Karlin does best: inspired interpretation grounded in extensive research. In each chapter he unfolds the larger story of a particular song and its variants—where and when it was composed and performed, layers of meanings which have accrued—while attending to the changed contexts which surround it in the literary work. Interweaving these narratives enables him to bring out unsuspected dimensions of a poem or a novel. e book’s six main chapters proceed from William Wordsworth (the blind musician hailed as ‘An Orpheus! an Orpheus!’ in ‘e Power of Song’, which Karlin nicely juxtaposes with the very different view of street song as intolerable noise represented in William Hogarth’s print of e Enrag’d Musician). We then move through Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning (the child singing ‘O bella libertà’  Reviews in the opening lines of Casa Guidi Windows, the snatches of stornelli that distract the painter in ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’), James Joyce (the one-legged sailor who wanders through Dublin in Ulysses, growling out lines from ‘e Death of Nelson’), Virginia Woolf (the unintelligible singing of an ancient woman, heard by both Peter Walsh and Rezia Smith outside Regent’s Park Tube Station in Mrs. Dalloway), to Marcel Proust (early morning Paris street cries driing up to the windows of the narrator in La Prisonière, volume  of A la recherche du temps perdu). roughout, Karlin pursues complicated strands of meaning borne by street songs or cries to show an author’s triumphant use of them in a different literary design. e volume concludes with a final chapter on Walt Whitman (a knife-grinder in ‘Sparkles from the Wheel’)—the sole American example and the only instance where sight rather than sound provides the design for a literary composition. Perhaps the best way to read this book is simply to take pleasure in what it provides. But if one did want to use the evidence of these seven case studies to think about larger questions, what would these be? I have already suggested one: how do writers translate song (or sound) into a written text? In some...