There was much uncertainty about how voice related to body in the early eighteenth century, and this became a major subject of scientific and cultural interest. In Voices from Beyond, Scott Sanders provides an interdisciplinary and transnational study of eighteenth-century conceptions of the human voice. His book examines the diversity of thought about vocal materiality and its roles in philosophical and literary works from the period, uncovering representations of the voice that intertwine physiology with physics, music with moral philosophy, and literary description with performance. Voices from Beyond focuses on the voice as it was constructed in French works, influenced by French vocal sciences as well as British literary and philosophical texts. It considers the writing of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Denis Diderot, François Baculard d'Arnaud, and Jacques Cazotte in particular, and explores how their texts theorize, represent, and construct three interrelated vocal types: the sentimental, the vitalist, and the uncanny. These authors represented the human voice as an intersectional organ with implications for one's emotional disposition, physical health, cultural identity, gender, and sexuality. Sanders argues that while the conception of sentimental and vitalist voices was anchored to a physiological understanding of vocal organs, this paradoxically led to the development of a disembodied, uncanny voice--one that could imitate the sounds of a good moral fiber while masking a monstrous physiology.

Slaves in chains, toiling on master’s plantation. Beatings, bloodied whips. This is what many of us envision when we think of 19th century African Americans; source materials penned by those who suffered in bondage validate this picture. Yet slavery was not the only identity of 19th century African Americans. Whether they were freeborn, self-liberated, or born in the years after the Emancipation, African Americans had a rich cultural heritage all their own, a heritage largely subsumed in popular history and collective memory by the atrocity of slavery. The early 19th century birthed the nation’s first black-owned periodicals, the first media spaces to provide primary outlets for the empowerment of African American voices. For many, poetry became this empowerment. Almost every black-owned periodical featured an open call for poetry, and African Americans, both free and enslaved, responded by submitting droves of poems for publication. Yet until now, these poems -- and an entire literary movement -- have been lost to modern readers. The poems in Voices Beyond Bondage address the horrific and the mundane, the humorous and the ordinary and the extraordinary. Authors wrote about slavery, but also about love, morality, politics, perseverance, nature, and God. These poems evidence authors who were passionate, dedicated, vocal, and above all resolute in a bravery which was both weapon and shield against a world of prejudice and inequity. These authors wrote to be heard; more than 150 years later it is at last time for us to listen.

A thoroughly revised and updated edition of the classic text. Focuses on the roles of hope, participation, and change in reforming American schools.