Interwar Britain--called the 'age of noise'--witnessed a pervasive preoccupation with 'unwanted' sound. With the rising hum of air and road traffic, the roar of industry, and the reverberations of newly popular sound technologies, everyday urban din became an increasingly urgent subject of interrogation. Practitioners across the arts and sciences sought to listen in to, represent, and regulate the causes and effects of excess or disruptive sound. Noise was one of the pre-eminent frameworks for conceptualizing modernity and its effects. Writing Noise in Interwar Britain explores this multi-disciplinary preoccupation and argues for its connection to the sonic legacy of the First World War.
The extreme decibel levels of the conflict brought about not only a concern with the effects of noise on minds and bodies, but a reconceptualization of the material effects of everyday sound. Modernist writers were at the forefront of this sonic-mindedness and derived creative fuel from tuning in to the noisescapes found in war zones, cities, factories, domestic spaces, and the countryside. In this way, literary fiction is not only a key source of auditory history but a site in which definitions of unwanted or resistant sound were rehearsed. Sound became noise and vice versa. This volume brings literary studies into conversation with the history of medicine, technology, and industrial psychology to demonstrate the importance of noise to understandings of technological modernity and the racial, gender, and class politics of national identity of this period. Noise is about power: its designation can be a silencing technique brought to bear on marginalized individuals or communities as much as it can be a mode of protest against those very measures.
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This book explores the preoccupation with 'unwanted' sound in interwar Britain. It contends that the extreme decibel levels brought about during WW1 created not only a concern with the effects of noise on the mind and body, but a reconceptualization of the material effects of sound that influenced writers.
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Introduction 1: Writing War Noise: Auditory Shock and the Sonic Legacy of the First World War 2: 'No Needless Noise': The Biopolitics of Interwar Noise Abatement 3: The Sonification of Domestic Space: Radio and the 'Good Listener' 4: Industrial Noise, Factory Fiction, and the Sounds of Protest 5: Listening to 'Nature': Rural Noise, Interwar Preservation, and Forms of Sonic Nationalism Coda:: Writing the Blitz
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Anna Snaith is Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature at King's College London. She studied at the University of Toronto (BA) and University College London (PhD) and joined the English Department at King's College London in 2003. She was Head of English between 2020 and 2022. She is a former member of the AHRC's Peer Review College and is on the editorial board of the Woolf Studies Annual, Modern Fiction Studies, and Modernism/modernity.
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A fresh take on interwar Britain through a focus on noise and forms of sonic modernity
Offers a multi-disciplinary perspective on this period of sonic history by reading a wide range of literature alongside published and archival material relating to noise abatement, the history of medicine, and industrial psychology
Provides a new understanding of the sonic legacies of the First World War
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780198951476
Publisert
2025
Utgiver
Oxford University Press
Vekt
630 gr
Høyde
19 mm
Bredde
156 mm
Dybde
234 mm
Aldersnivå
P, 06
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet
Antall sider
336
Forfatter