Sound and Literature

Description

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.

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.