Victorian soundscapes / / John M. Picker

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910824422603321
• Autore: Picker John M. <1970->
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: New York, : Oxford University Press, c2003
• ISBN: 0198034660; 9780198034667
• Edizione: [1st ed.]
• Descrizione fisica: xi, 220 p. : ill
• Disciplina: 820.9/356
• Soggetti: English literature - 19th century - History and criticism; Sound in literature; Sound - Recording and reproducing - Great Britain - History - 19th century; Speech in literature; Voice in literature
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references (p. 193-210) and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Intro -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Introduction:The Tramp of a Fly's Footstep -- Hearing Things -- An Auscultative Age -- Nuisance and Resonance -- 1 "What the Waves Were Always Saying":Voices, Volumes -- Babbage and Dickens: A Library of Air -- "Away, with a Shriek, and a Roar, and a Rattle" -- Forever and Forever through Space -- 2 The Soundproof Study:Victorian Professional Identity and Urban Noise -- Scatterbrain London -- "Blackguard Savoyards and Herds of German Swine" -- Writers' Block -- Embodying Noise:The Leech Case -- "Great Facts" -- 3 George Eliot's Ear: New Acoustics in Daniel Deronda and Beyond -- On the Other Side of Silence -- Helmholtz and Eliot: Sympathetic Vibration -- "On the Verge of a Great Discovery":Talking Cures -- 4 The Recorded Voice from Victorian Aura to Modernist Echo -- Tennyson's Talking Machine -- "Send Me Mr. Gladstone's Voice" -- Sinful Speech -- Sound Bites -- Coda:The Victor Dog -- Appendix: Dickens's Prospectus for the Cheap Edition (1847) -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- X -- Y -- Z.
• Sommario/riassunto: 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, andecho 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.