Sounding Bodies

Acoustical Science and Musical Erotics in Victorian Literature

Shannon Draucker (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

294 Seiten

2025
State University of New York Press (Verlag)
978-1-4384-9840-9 (ISBN)

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Shows how nineteenth-century discoveries in acoustical science shaped Victorian literary representations of gender, sexuality, and intimacy.

Can the concert hall be as erotic as the bedroom? Many Victorian writers believed so. In the mid-nineteenth century, acoustical scientists such as Hermann von Helmholtz and John Tyndall described music as a set of physical vibrations that tickled the ear, excited the nerves, and precipitated muscular convulsions. In turn, writers—from canonical figures such as George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, to New Women novelists like Sarah Grand and Bertha Thomas, to anonymous authors of underground pornography—depicted bodily sensations and experiences in unusually explicit ways. These writers used scenes of music listening and performance to intervene in urgent conversations about gender and sexuality and explore issues of agency, pleasure, violence, desire, and kinship. Sounding Bodies shows how both classical music and Victorian literature, while often considered bastions of conservatism and repression, represented powerful sites for feminist and queer politics.

This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships Open Book Program—a limited competition designed to make outstanding humanities books available to a wide audience. Learn more at the Fellowships Open Book Program at : https://www.neh.gov/grants/odh/FOBP/, and access the book online at the SUNY Open Access Repository at https://soar.suny.edu/handle/20.500.12648/14996
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Shannon Draucker is Assistant Professor of English at Siena College.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction The Erotic Symphony

Part One: Sounds and Bodies

1. Hearing, Touching, Feeling Sound: Acoustical Science in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Part Two: Genders

2. Bare Arms and Quivering Nerves: The "Lady Violinist" Novels of Mary Augusta Ward and M. E. Francis

3.Cross-Dressing Violinists and Music/Gender Performance in The Heavenly Twins and The Violin-Player

Part Three: Sexualities

4. Dangerous Vibrations: Musical Rape in George Eliot and Thomas Hardy

5. Orgasm in the Orchestra Box: Teleny's Musical Pornography

Part Four: Intimacies

6. Fiddle Feelings: Human-Instrument Intimacies in Dickens, Eliot, Trollope, and Hardy

7. Musical Hauntings and Otherworldly Erotics in The Lost Stradivarius and "A Wicked Voice"

Coda Re-vitalizing Contemporary Classical Music

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Erscheint lt. Verlag	2.1.2025
Reihe/Serie	SUNY series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century
Zusatzinfo	Total Illustrations: 15
Verlagsort	Albany, NY
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	227 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturgeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Gender Studies
ISBN-10	1-4384-9840-3 / 1438498403
ISBN-13	978-1-4384-9840-9 / 9781438498409
Zustand	Neuware