Far from the hushed restraint we associate with the Victorians, their world pulsated with sound. This book shows how, in more ways than one, Victorians were hearing things. The representations close listeners left of their soundscapes offered new meanings for silence, music, noise, voice, and echo that constitute an important part of the Victorian legacy to us today. In chronicling the shift from Romantic to modern configurations of sound and voice, Picker draws upon literary and scientific works to recapture the sense of aural discovery figures such as Babbage, Helmholtz, Freud, Bell, and Edison shared with the likes of Dickens, George Eliot, Tennyson, Stoker, and Conrad.

Far from the hushed restraint we associate with the Victorians their world pulsated with sound. This book shows how, in more ways than one, Victorians were hearing things. John Picker draws upon literary and scientific works to recapture the Victorian sense of aural discovery.

The plight of the fallen woman is one of the salient themes of nineteenth-century art and literature; indeed, the ubiquity of the trope galvanized the Victorian conscience and acted as a spur to social reform. In some notable examples, Julia Grella O’Connell argues, the iconography of the Victorian fallen woman was associated with music, reviving an ancient tradition conflating the practice of music with sin and the abandonment of music with holiness. The prominence of music symbolism in the socially-committed, quasi-religious paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites and their circle, and in the Catholic-Wagnerian novels of George Moore, gives evidence of the survival of a pictorial language linking music with sin and conversion, and shows, even more remarkably, that this language translated fairly easily into the cultural lexicon of Victorian Britain. Drawing upon music iconography, art history, patristic theology, and sensory theory, Grella O’Connell investigates female fallenness and its implications against the backdrop of the social and religious turbulence of the mid-nineteenth century.

Far from the hushed restraint we associate with the Victorians, their world pulsated with sound. This book shows how, in more ways than one, Victorians were hearing things. John Picker draws upon literary and scientific works to recapture the Victorian sense of aural discovery.

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.

Navigating Urban Soundscapes: Dublin and Los Angeles in Fiction offers an innovative analytical framework to explore sound in different media and across two distinct urban soundscapes. Studying a wide range of novels, films, and radio dramas, using Dublin and Los Angeles as case studies, Annika Eisenberg asks how sounds are aestheticised to signify urban space in fiction, and how sounds allow such fictional urban spaces to be navigated, both by auscultators, the characters listening within a work of fiction, and by auditeurs, the implied audience of a fictional work. Eisenberg argues that the concept of “urban sound” is a cultural and aesthetic construct, and in doing so, she shows why aesthetics needs to be front and center in sound studies.

Long ignored by scholars in the humanities, sound has just begun to take its place as an important object of study in the last few years. Since the late 19th century, there has been a paradigmatic shift in auditory cultures and practices in European societies. This change was brought about by modern phenomena such as urbanization, industrialization and mechanization, the rise of modern sciences, and of course the emergence of new sound recording and transmission media. This book contributes to our understanding of modern European history through the lens of sound by examining diverse subjects such as performed and recorded music, auditory technologies like the telephone and stethoscope, and the ambient noise of the city.