The Writer's Fugue

The Writer's Fugue is a philosophical musical-literary study of constructions of the subject as author by the state, and authors' constructions of subjectivity and the self in literature of modernity. Ruth Skilbeck surveys writers in exile and statelessness, and how authors adapt musical forms to transform psychological trauma in writing.

In her innovative investigation into fugue adaptations by authors in modernity, she chronicles the relationship of the rise and decline of fugue in music, and its emergence in literature, and the diagnosis of dissociative fugue in fin-de-siècle France; global surveillance, censorship and self-censorship, statelessness, and new literary fugues.