Sound Effects traces the history of the relationship between oral conditions and aural effect in English literature from its beginnings in the Anglo-Saxon period through to the twenty-first century. Few collections nowadays, other than textbook histories, would attempt a survey of their field from the early middle ages to the present day, and it is not our intention here to offer a continuous narrative. But despite the many centuries covered by this collection, the reader will find that certain themes recur in different contexts and that the individual essays speak to each other, often over long distances of time. It ends where it might have begun, with Homer, though in modern English form. The effect of this pattern is to create an “envelope” structure in which the ancient oral forms of Greek and Anglo-Saxon verse reappear as contexts for understanding how these forms survive and how sound works in the poetry of the modern world. The scope of the volume is also determined by its subject, since we are concerned with tradition as well as with the oral and aural. In particular, we are concerned with how literary production and reception respond to the different waves of media evolution from oral to written, manuscript to print (and the theater), and the later development of machine technology. We are not specifically concerned with the computer and the Internet, though they are an unstated presence behind the project as a whole. A subsidiary theme is the way in which sound, understood in both oral and aural terms, provides the agency through which high and low, elite and popular cultures are brought into conjunction throughout English literature.

This paper considers the interface between the native, inherited, secular, vernacular, and oral legacy in Anglo-Saxon poetry and that of the foreign, imported, Christian, Latin, and written tradition that subsumed and largely supplanted it, at least in the extant record. A variety of Anglo-Saxon poets and poems are considered, including Aldhelm, Bede, Alcuin, and Boniface in Latin, and Cædmon and Cynewulf in Old English, as well as a range of anonymous poems including Beowulf, Andreas, Guthlac B, The Seafarer, and The Paris Psalter. The shared roles of memory, imitation, and self-conscious coinage in both Latin and Old English are considered, and it is suggested that traces of a once-thriving oral tradition that was partly shared by literate and illiterate poets alike can still be detected in the surviving written record.

Descriptions of battle in Old English poetry frequently refer to noise: clattering weapons, howling beasts, and general clamor. Noises are particularly prominent in the type-scenes of the approach to battle and the beasts of battle, and they help evoke the psychological dimension of fighting, especially the mounting excitement and terror before the clash of armies. Further, beast-cries are often depicted as song; this is heavily ironic, but it also refers self-reflexively to the role of the poet. In Exodus a contrast between trumpets and wolves articulates the drama of the Israelites’ struggle of faith. Trumpets are associated with courage, initiative, and communication, wolf-song with terror, paralysis, and loss of speech. The noisiness of the poem also helps to highlight, however, the poet’s mastery of a complex allegory. An exploration of battle noises enables us to relate Old English poetry to Elaine Scarry’s comments on language and war.

The privileging of writing, often not simply metaphorically, over the “fantasies” of a pristine orality has been the impetus of much recent scholarship built on the foundations laid in Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1967). But such explicit privileging is not new. Richard Mulcaster (1531/32-1611), an Elizabethan schoolmaster and educational reformer, declared in his Positions (1581) that “though writing in order to traine do succeed reading, yet in nature and time it must needes be elder,” a stance Jonathan Goldberg (1990) has perceptively discovered at work even when Mulcaster claims, one year later in the Elementarie (1582), to tell an allegory of sound’s originary position in the history of writing. While it does not seek to restore the primacy of orality in his works, this essay argues first that Mulcaster’s displacement of sound is not as tidy as both he and Goldberg would suggest, and therefore, second, that the consequent perception of “nature”—here that of children—is not as determinative.

The ungovernability of sound in Shakespeare is reflected in the multiple meanings of the word itself, which include the senses of whole or undiseased, and of fathoming or sounding out. This instability is also the source of many aurally generated meanings that have been lost to us through the standardizing editorial traditions of print. This essay sounds out some of these suppressed meanings and locates them within the broader social context of the polyglot communities of early modern London, which were responsible for the macaronic character of Shakespeare’s language. In doing so, Parker shows that puns should not be dismissed as mere verbal quibbles but rather help to reveal the broader cultural associations of the plays. Sound effects are, therefore, integral to meaning, and the aural dimension of Shakespeare’s language is a vital resource both for the editor and for the cultural historian.

Marshall McLuhan, pioneer of modern media studies, wrote his Ph.D. thesis on the Elizabethan writer Thomas Nashe and the history of the classical trivium. This essay shows how McLuhan’s early exposure to Nashe influenced his later work on speech, print, and modern media. It argues that Nashe’s use of print to re-create oral conditions and his invention of personae drawn from fairground and marketplace helped shape McLuhan’s response to media and popular culture. Rhodes goes on to argue that it was Nashe’s attack on Ramus, to which McLuhan gave particular emphasis, that was the source of the idea that print promotes linear thinking and closure at the expense of the very different qualities associated with oral culture. He ends by countering some of the charges made against McLuhan that he sentimentalizes the oral by using it to represent an ideal of human wholeness.

This essay investigates oral culture’s role in the creation of voice in James Macpherson’s Ossian poems. Macpherson insisted that these poems, first published in 1760, were translations of Ossian, an ancient Scottish bard; since their appearance, readers have fiercely debated the authenticity of his claim. This essay seeks to shift the debate by focusing on his poems as a printed object. It argues that Macpherson uses innovative literary strategies and typographical techniques to “invent” oral voices on the page. Through these techniques, Macpherson approximates the sense of connection between singer and listener, and transfers to his text the passion and wildness associated with bardic performance. His poetics addresses readers as participants, and reanimates their experience of the silent reading. This essay ultimately shows that traditions once considered marginal—geographically and politically—to English culture were in fact instrumental to the cohesion of the period’s notion of what poetic voice is and what it can do.

This essay analyzes orality and song performance in the eighteenth-century diaries of James Boswell, gentleman Scot and literary figure. Boswell’s engagement of song culture in the course of his activities—literary, political, amorous, familial, domestic, traveling, business, and leisure—demonstrates the eighteenth-century mixing of oral and written and of popular culture and belles lettres, and shows the significance of oral forms and expression among even the most literate and literary people. Theorizing song performance as social interaction shaped by power relations, this essay calls for a widening of the study of orality to include greater consideration of the past, of the informal and quotidian realm, and of the oral and performative dimensions of literate cultures. Boswell’s diaries depict his everyday life from the 1760s to the 1790s in London and Scotland and on various European sojourns. In them he represents himself and others singing and invoking popular songs in complex ways that disclose dynamics of identity formation and relational power.

In seeking to understand the processes and identify the products of oral transmission in early English verbal culture, it can be useful to seek enlightenment in the study of later traditions that are better documented. This paper pursues an ongoing line of research that focuses on English crime ballads, originally published as broadsides, and recovered from folk tradition decades or centuries later. The known relative provenance of the texts allows the impact of oral transmission to be identified exactly and with confidence. In this instance a ballad published in 1828 on the trial of William Corder for the murder of Maria Marten is juxtaposed both with a version recorded from an Oxfordshire singer in 1972, and with a journalistic prose account that was evidently a direct source, enabling an analysis of both the song’s written composition and its “decomposition” in what it is suggested might properly be called “memoral” tradition.

The unprecedented expansion of cities in nineteenth-century England was not merely a quantitative transformation, but also generated profound changes in the national imaginary and modes of representing the urban order. These changes were evident in a range of discourses, including those of class, ethnicity, gender, place and space, and national identity. A deeper shift underpinning all of these involved the “urban epistemology,” the balance between the city known and represented as something seen and something heard. Increasingly, the city became meaningful as a “sound effect” rather than as a spectacle. The increasing size of cities made it difficult to engage with them literally and conceptually as panoramas, and their sprawling, segmented precincts and infrastructures produced a visual dis-integration. At the same time, the level and character of the acoustic environment emphasized the sonic distinctiveness of the city through the proliferation of technologized sonorities and sonic technologies. This paper exemplifies the literary manifestations of a nineteenth-century shift in the urban information economy from the visual to the auditory.

James Joyce uses both lexical and nonlexical onomatopoeia extensively in Ulysses; this essay examines some of the ways in which he employs the latter in order to convey noises of many kinds. Nonlexical onomatopoeia is particularly suited to the evocation of noise, though it can only do so in conjunction with shared literary and linguistic conventions. Several of the characters in Ulysses show an interest in the representation of noise in language, but there are many more examples where there is no evidence of mental processes at work. The reader’s pleasure in Joyce’s nonlexical onomatopoeia is very seldom the result of vivid imitation; it is, as these examples testify, Joyce’s play with the workings of the device (and frequently its failure to imitate the nonlinguistic world) that provides enjoyment and some insight into the relation between language and sound.

This essay examines the representation or staging of oral performance and poetic composition within Beowulf, in order to argue that poem thematizes and mythologizes its own origins, and is as much interested in recovering the sounds of oral performances that pre-date its own manuscript inscription as modern Anglo-Saxon scholarship has been. The second half of the essay considers the recovery and reimagining of an Anglo-Saxon “soundscape” in the work of two twentieth-century poets, W. S. Graham and Edwin Morgan. The invocation of this “Saxonesque” patterning of sound invokes or triggers a historically constituted set of associations with the whole body of Old English poetry; that is, an allusion to a corpus, rather than to a specific text, is made through sound patterning.

Christopher Logue’s adaptations of Homer’s Iliad go by the collective title of War Music, hinting at the importance of sound for Logue’s conception of the project. This article examines Logue’s Homer in the context of other contemporary translators of Homer who have all sought, in various ways, to produce translations that bring Homer to life. In Logue’s case, performance is a vital part of this enlivening, resulting in a poem with an intrinsic oral dimension, which is reproduced on the page via various typographical cues and reinforced by the poem’s performance history on radio and stage. In this essay the soundscape of Logue’s Homer is illustrated by a detailed case study of a single scene from Book 16 of the Iliad, in which the sound effects present in the Homeric simile are amplified. It considers the paradox of attributing aural fidelity to a free adaptation of Homer, before concluding that Logue’s adaptation can make us more attuned to the acoustic potential of Homer. Conversely, the tension between writing and oral genres inherent in Homeric epic can lead us to a better understanding of the relationship between the written and spoken word in Logue’s Homer.