Acoustics in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Science
Listening at the Threshold

A cross-disciplinary study into how new sound technologies transformed Victorian ideas of the relationship between body and environment.

Melissa Dickson (Author)

9781009490450, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 19 December 2024

314 pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 2.2 cm, 0.59 kg

What did it mean to hear, for the first time, what George Eliot described as 'that roar which lies on the other side of silence'? Rapid developments in nineteenth-century acoustic science and communications technologies opened up new worlds beyond the limits of normal audibility for the Victorian public. Weaving together explorations of scientific developments with imaginative cultural, spiritual, and literary responses, this book sets out to explore the burgeoning field of acoustics in the nineteenth century and the new language, structure, and conceptual models it offered to broker the boundaries of the individual self. Ranging from Eliot's Middlemarch to Du Maurier's Trilby, and from Laënnec's work on the stethoscope to experiments on animal audition, inquiries into the unconscious, and spiritualist investigations of the hidden world of vibrations, it demonstrates the profound challenge to the boundaries of the human that was issued by new sound technologies in the Victorian period.

Introduction: whispers in the roar
Part I: 1. Accessing the sounds of the body
2. Stethoscopic fantasies
3. Middlemarch and the art of stethoscopic listening
Part II: 4. At the limits of audibility
5. Animal music
Part III: 6. Sounds of the séance
7. Played upon or player? Musical mediums and creative inspiration
8. Dickens among the spiritualists
Part IV: 9. Mesmeric soundscapes
10. 'The Individual Operated Upon': powers of mind and music in George Du Maurier's Trilby.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]