Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Sound Studies

Helen Groth is Professor of English in the School of Arts and Media, University of New South Wales. She is the author of Victorian Photography and Literary Nostalgia (Oxford University Press, 2004), Moving Images. Nineteenth-Century Reading and Screen Practices (Edinburgh University Press, 2013), and co-author of Dreams and Modernity. A Cultural History (Routledge, 2013). She is the co-editor of a number of books and special journal issues, most recently Sounding Modernism: Rhythm and Sonic Mediation in Modern Literature and Film (Edinburgh University Press, 2017) and Writing the Global Riot (Oxford University Press, 2023). Julian Murphet is Jury Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Adelaide. He is the author, previously, of Literature and Race in Los Angeles (Cambridge University Press, 2001), Multimedia Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 2009), Faulkner’s Media Romance (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Todd Solondz (Northern Illinois University Press, 2019), and of the forthcoming Modern Character: 1888–1905 (Oxford University Press, 2023) and Twentieth-Century Prison Writing: A Literary Guide (Edinburgh University Press, 2023).

This expertly organised volume, composed of foundational and up-and-coming voices, asserts the rightful place of writing and language in the study of sound. While it’s long been a truism that the sonic turn is against the linguistic, this volume begins from a deconstructive premise to encounter the literary anew in the most vital debates in sound studies today.

• List of FiguresIntroductionHelen Groth and Julian MurphetPart I: Literature, Listening, Sounding1. The Sound a Sentence Makes: On Poetry, Judgement, and HearingAstrid Lorange2. The Limits of Listening: Riotous Women, Imperial Structures, and Sonic ArchivesHelen Groth3. PIANO/Forte: Writing Audible Space, Jane Austen, Dorothy Richardson, and OthersDavid Toop4. Oralities, Literacies, and the Xenophobic FallacyRichard Cullen RathPart II: Literature, Music, Performance5. Notes to Literature: Scores as Musical Reproduction in the Literary TextTamlyn Avery6. Sound Agonistes: Music and the Economy of Sacrifice in Sound StudiesMiranda Stanyon 7. Shakespeare’s Vibrant TheatresBruce R. Smith8. ‘Imaginative and musical mixtures of sounds’: Rap, Patter, and Hyper Diction in Musical TheatreTamsen O. WolffPart III: Literature, Voice, Acousmatics9. ‘Let it resound’: ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ as Sonic WitnessNoelle Morrissette 10. Sound Media, Race, and VoiceSam Halliday11. The Acousmatics of Prison WritingJulian Murphet12. Aural Anxiety and Rurality in Women’s Second World War WritingImogen FreePart IV: Literature, Media, Coded Sound13. Sound Technology and US Fiction in the Postwar Era: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Cross-Racial ListeningK. C. Harrison 14. Coded Sound: Reading in the Age of Networked MediaJustin St. Clair15. Media Affordances of Literary Audio: Interrelations of Format and FormJason Camlot16. OH-EE-OH-EE-OH-EE-AW-EE-AW!: Sound Descriptors in the Books of Tarzan as Facilitators of PresenceMark Grimshaw-AagaardPart V: Literature, War, Industry17. An Auditory History of Early Modernity: Listening to Enlightenment and Industry in Britain, 1700–1900Peter Denney18. ‘This is/not was’: The Violence of Circulation and the Sonics of Submerged LanguageAndrew Brooks19. Shriek and Hum: Industrial Noise and ProductivityDavid Ellison 20. A Critical Poetics of WarfareMark Byron21. The Great War: Sonic Fragments in Literature and Sound StudiesMichael BullPart VI: Literature, Sonic Epistemology, Language22. Sonic EpistemologiesHolger Schulze23. The Cultural Poetics of a Buoyancy Sound from Amazonian EcuadorJanis Nuckolls24. Havoc OrnithologiesJody BerlandNotes on ContributorsIndex