Caryl Phillips’s Musicalized Fiction and its Impact on the Reader

In The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality Werner Wolf, one of the few specialists of the interdisciplinary field of “Word and Music Studies”, differentiates two forms of musico-literary intermediality: thematization (on the level of the story wherever music is discussed, described, listened to) and imitation (linguistic means or literary techniques to imitate or evoke music). It on the basis of this distinction that I would like to concentrate on three of Phillips’s novels: The Lost Child (2015) for the thematic aspect, The Nature of Blood (1997) for approximating music, Dancing in the Dark (2005) for both forms of relations between music and literature.