Sounding Out Homer: Christopher Logue’s Acoustic Homer
Emily Greenwood
Christopher Logue’s adaptations of Homer’s Iliad go by the collective title of War Music, hinting at the importance of sound…
Where Now the Harp? Listening for the Sounds of Old English Verse, from Beowulf to the Twentieth Century
Chris Jones
This essay examines the representation or staging of oral performance and poetic composition within Beowulf, in order to argue that…
Joyce’s Noises
Derek Attridge
James Joyce uses both lexical and nonlexical onomatopoeia extensively in Ulysses; this essay examines some of the ways in which…
Sites of Sound
Bruce Johnson
The unprecedented expansion of cities in nineteenth-century England was not merely a quantitative transformation, but also generated profound changes in…
Written Composition and (Mem)oral Decomposition: The Case of “The Suffolk Tragedy”
Tom Pettitt
In seeking to understand the processes and identify the products of oral transmission in early English verbal culture, it can…
Theorizing Orality and Performance in Literary Anecdote and History: Boswell’s Diaries
Dianne Dugaw
This essay analyzes orality and song performance in the eighteenth-century diaries of James Boswell, gentleman Scot and literary figure. Boswell’s…
James Macpherson’s Ossian Poems, Oral Traditions, and the Invention of Voice
James Mulholland
This essay investigates oral culture’s role in the creation of voice in James Macpherson’s Ossian poems. Macpherson insisted that these…
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On Speech, Print, and New Media: Thomas Nashe and Marshall McLuhan
Neil Rhodes
Marshall McLuhan, pioneer of modern media studies, wrote his Ph.D. thesis on the Elizabethan writer Thomas Nashe and the history…
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Shakespeare’s Sound Government: Sound Defects, Polyglot Sounds, and Sounding Out
Patricia Parker
The ungovernability of sound in Shakespeare is reflected in the multiple meanings of the word itself, which include the senses…
Mulcaster’s Tyrant Sound
John Wesley
The privileging of writing, often not simply metaphorically, over the “fantasies” of a pristine orality has been the impetus of…
The Trumpet and the Wolf: Noises of Battle in Old English Poetry
Alice Jorgensen
Descriptions of battle in Old English poetry frequently refer to noise: clattering weapons, howling beasts, and general clamor. Noises are…
The Word Made Flesh: Christianity and Oral Culture in Anglo-Saxon Verse
Andy Orchard
This paper considers the interface between the native, inherited, secular, vernacular, and oral legacy in Anglo-Saxon poetry and that of…
Sound Effects: The Oral/Aural Dimensions of Literature in English Introduction
Chris Jones, Neil Rhodes
Sound Effects traces the history of the relationship between oral conditions and aural effect in English literature from its beginnings…
