Sound and Literature

This volume maps and interrogates the significance of sound as a central concept in literary studies.

Sound and Literature will be invaluable to students and scholars working in a range of disciplines: literary studies, sound studies, musico-literary studies, sensory history and media studies. The range of approaches to literary sound - such as music, noise, voice, vibration and deafness - make this book unique for its comprehensive mapping of the field.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.