Bebop Between the Lines: Changing Representations of Jazz in Postwar American Fiction

ABSTRACT Jazz began to make its way into narrative fiction shortly after the music emerged in the early 1920s. This thesis discusses the impact of jazz in a specific historical moment in America and analyzes the way the music entered postwar American fiction, in order to outline similarities and differences in Euro-American and African- American narratives. Drawing from works dedicated to study the development of postwar jazz and its influence on society such as Scott DeVeaux’s The Birth of Bebop, and following analysis which investigate the role of race in the interpretation and portrayal of jazz in narrative fiction, such as Jon Panish’s The Color of Jazz, I argue that after WWII jazz began to acquire a whole new set of meanings for both white and black America, and that such renewed approach to jazz music rapidly transferred to fiction. Although jazz entered the works of both Euro-American and African-American writers of fiction, their representations, I argue, mirror a profoundly different appreciation and understanding of the subject, which ultimately is possible to ascribe to the racial and cultural background of the authors. In Chapter one and two, I provide a general outlook of jazz in the postwar period in order to outline its main characteristics as both an artistic movement and a social phenomenon. Then, I discuss one of the most exploited representations of the figure of jazz artist in fiction, namely the jazz musician as an outsider and a deviant figure. In Chapter three and four, I first discuss the way white narratives tend to apply a sort of romantic approach to jazz as a subject matter and rely on a primitivistic view of both the music and the performer. Finally, I discuss how jazz in black narratives acquires a special significance as a vehicle to express the importance of tradition, cohesion, and identity for the entire African-American community.