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Literature as Sound Studies
Literature as Sound Studies
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Description
Literature as Sound Studies identifies literature as a site of sonic invention and reconfiguration, contributing a range of terms, models, and methods for attending to sound.
Considering literary works drawn from a range of traditions-from twentieth-century Moroccan poems to early-modern English plays-Literature as Sound Studies brings out the sophisticated ways that literary writers and commentators have used and studied sound. Moving beyond the use of literature as mere ear witness to history, this collection brings out the complexity of sonic figuration in literature and literary studies, suggesting how this attentiveness to sound might anticipate, illuminate, and enrich the contemporary field of sound studies.
The very category of the literary, considered as a subset of language writ large, has often hinged on the particular attention that literary works draw to their own sound, whether that sound be psychologically rehearsed, as in silent reading, or acoustically realized, as in a theatrical performance. Weaving together methods and concepts drawn from both literary and sound studies, these essays make legible literature's complex role in shaping and writing a history of sound.
Table of Contents
List of Contributors
1. Litearture as Sound Studies: An Introduction
yasser elhariry and Liesl Yamaguchi
Sounds of Difference
2. Beyond Earwitnesses: Thomas Dekker's Soundwriting
Scott Trudell
3. The Rhythm of Gender in To the Lighthouse
Eliza Zingesser
4. Listening to Neo/Colonial Extraction in the “Seismic Poetics” of Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine
David Fieni
Sounds of Verse
5. Fugitive Color: From Troy to the Black Atlantic
Shane Butler
6. Victorian Poetry, Heard and Unheard
Naomi Levine
7. Poetry as Sound Studies, or the Methodological Challenges of Shifting from Legible to Audible Archives
Abigail Lang
Sounds of Science
8. Figures of Sound: Metaphors of Acoustics in Early Modern France
Scott Sanders
9. The Romantic Poet as Aural Philologist: Translating the Erotic-Acoustics of the Multilingual Origins of Language
Tanvi Solanki
Resonance
10. Kafka's Musicology: Silence and a Drone
David Copenhafer
11. Boris Vian's Resonant Sound Map of the Embodied Mind
Alexandra Lukes
Index
Product details
| Published | 12 Jun 2025 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Extent | 256 |
| ISBN | 9798765121382 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
About the contributors
Reviews
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This edited collection makes a significant and welcome intervention in the field of sound studies through its centering of the literary and the textual. Literature as Sound Studies reminds us that the literary is not merely 'ear witness' to the past but a place where the audible is constituted and sound worlds are produced. Editors yasser elhariry and Liesl Yamaguchi have assembled a fantastic roster of scholars writing on a historically and geographically diverse set of writers (from Thomas Dekker to Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine to Franz Kafka) who attend in complex ways to these provocations.
Anna Snaith, Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature, King's College London, UK
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A resource exquisitely attuned to literature's neglected soundplay and rightful place within the booming field of sound studies.
Matthew Rubery, Professor of Modern Literature, Queen Mary University of London, UK
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Literature as Sound Studies revives a mode of inquiry into the sonic dimensions of literary texts first explored over 25 years ago in the groundbreaking collections Sound States (Adelaide Morris) and Close Listening (Charles Bernstein). The welcome strength of the essays in this new collection is how they proceed with an expanded descriptive and conceptual vocabulary, developed in the interim, across the thriving, interdisciplinary field of sound studies. The phonographic readings of literary works offered here explore and resonate with new critical timbres.
Jason Camlot, author of Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings (2019), UK
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Literature within sound studies has long been treated as a silent historical resource. This volume puts the various sounds of literature squarely within the field of study and does so through a geographically and chronologically ranging series of interventions. Anybody who has wondered how the tools of sound studies might inform literary analysis-and, importantly, vice versa-will find much with which to engage here.
James A. Steintrager, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine, USA


















