Sound and Literature

by Anna Snaith

Overview

What does it mean to write in and about sound? How can literature, seemingly a silent, visual medium, be sound-bearing? This volume considers these questions by attending to the energy generated by the sonic in literary studies from the late nineteenth century to the present. Sound, whether understood as noise, music, rhythm, voice or vibration, has long shaped literary cultures and their scholarship. In original chapters written by leading scholars in the field, this book tunes in to the literary text as a site of vocalisation, rhythmics and dissonance, as well as an archive of soundscapes, modes of listening, and sound technologies. Sound and Literature is unique for the breadth and plurality of its approach, and for its interrogation and methodological mapping of the field of literary sound studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781108479608
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	06/18/2020
Series:	Cambridge Critical Concepts
Pages:	438
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.14(d)

About the Author

Anna Snaith is Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature at King's College London. Her publications include Virginia Woolf: Public and Private Negotiations (2000), and Modernist Voyages: Colonial Women Writers in London, 1890-1945 (2014). She has edited Virginia Woolf's The Years (2012) and  A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas (2015). She is currently working on a monograph on interwar literary modernism and noise.

Table of Contents

Part I. Origins: 1. Hearing and the senses Sam Halliday; 2. Fragments on/of voice David Nowell Smith; 3. Sonic forms: Ezra Pound's anti-metronome modernism in context Jason David Hall; 4. Classical music and literature Gemma Moss; 5. Aesthetics, music, noise Brad Bucknell; Part II. Development: 6. Literary soundscapes Helen Groth; 7. Noise James G. Mansell; 8. 'Lost in music': wild notes and organized sound Paul Gilroy; 9. Media history and sound technology Julie Beth Napolin; Part III. Applications: 10. What we talk about when we talk about talking books Edward Allen; 11. Prose sense and its soundings Garrett Stewart; 12. Dissonant prosody A. J. Carruthers; 13. Deafness and sound Rebecca Sanchez; 14. Vibrations Shelley Trower; 15. Feminism and sound Ella Finer; 16. Wireless imaginations Debra Rae Cohen; 17. Attending to theatre sound studies and Complicite's The Encounter Adrian Curtin; 18: Bob Dylan and sound: a tale of the recording era Barry J. Faulk.