In this book eleven scholars of literature or music explore various areas in which literature and music meet. While several of the authors of the volume apply in their articles the theory of intermediality, or the
interplay of different art forms, some of authors are of the opinion that literature and music share some basic elements, such as sound and meaning, which proves their innate kinship. The subjects of study in
the volume range historically from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century and deal with Russian, British, American, German, Finnish and Sámi works of literature or music as well as, in one case, film.

The literary texts studied in the articles show a variety of affinities with music. Contemporary Finnish lyrical poetry offers a great variety of examples of how the effect of a poem depends on its rhythmic
and other sound effects that give rise to a pre-semantic interaction between the poem and its audience. A work of narrative literature may be “compounded” of its elements similarly as a musical composition,
rather than being based on a plot that mimetically follows the events in the fictive world. A novel may have the form of a symphony, as in some representatives of the Central European tradition analysed here,
or of a fugue, like in some works of Vladimir Nabokov, or of jazz, as in the African-American tradition, and a biography of a blues singer may assume a blues-like form. The “musical mimesis” employed in
Finnish fin-de-siècle literature is marked by disruptions in the narrative line, “dissonances” due to the uniting of incongruous materials, synaesthesia, and the sound effects of language. Music can also be a
part of the fictive world in a literary work and employed for interpreting the events and characters, as an analysis of detective stories shows.

On the other hand, it is shown how the “story line” in a classical sonata can be analysed by using Vladimir Propp’s plot schemata of folk tales. A musical composition, such as Schumann’s Kreisleriana, may  draw its inspiration from a literary work, in which case musicians are invited to reflect upon the relevance of the source text when preparing a performance. In the article on film included here it is claimed that the soundtracks of contemporary films show a tendency towards “musicalization”: the speech resembles song or music, in which rhythm, speed, tone, breathing and other material aspects of the sound are of greater importance than the semantic content of the words. Music and literature are, of course, also combined in a song. Two types of songs are considered in the volume: the North Sámi yoik (‘luohti’) tradition in which music and speech seem to be close to their original unity, and Finnish rap music, of which particularly the aspects of rhythm and rhyme are analysed.