The Sound of Writing

Steven Justice, Christopher Cannon, Sarah Nooter, Sarah Kay, Jennifer Richards, Ian Cornelius, Emily Thornbury, Meredith Martin, Sean Curran, Alison Cornish, Christopher Cannon, Christopher Hasty, Christopher Cannon, Steven Justice

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Year: 2023
• eBook ISBN: 9781421447261
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Historical & Comparative Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

An interdisciplinary exploration of how writers have conveyed sound through text.

Edited by Christopher Cannon and Steven Justice, The Sound of Writing explores the devices and techniques that writers have used to represent sound and how they have changed over time. Contributors consider how writing has channeled sounds as varied as the human voice and the buzzing of bees using not only alphabets but also the resources of the visual and musical arts.

Cannon and Justice have assembled a constellation of classicists, medievalists, modernists, literary historians, and musicologists to trace the sound of writing from the beginning of the Western record to poetry written in the last century. This rich series of essays considers the writings of Sappho, Simonides, Aldhem, Marcabru, Dante Alighieri, William Langland, Charles Butler, Tennyson, Gertrude Stein, and T. S. Eliot as well as poems and songs in Ancient Greek, Old and Middle English, Italian, Old French, Occitan, and modern English. The book will interest anyone curious about the way sound has been preserved in the past and the kinds of ingenuity that can recover the process of that preservation.

Essays focus on questions of language and expression, and each contributor sets out a distinct method for understanding the relationship between sound and writing. Cannon and Justice open the volume with a survey of the various ways sound has been understood as the object of our senses. Each ensuing chapter presents a case study for a sonic phenomenology at a specific time in history. With approaches from a wide variety of disciplines, The Sound of Writing analyzes writing systems and the aural dimensions of literary cultures to reconstruct historical soundscapes in vivid ways.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Sounds and Matter of Women in Ancient Greek Epigrams
• 2 Reading Impressions: The Sound of the Sight of Occitan Verse
• 3 Voices and Bees: The Evolution of Charles Butler’s Acoustic Book
• 4 Prosodic Protocols and Interruptions of Them in Piers Plowman
• 5 Latin Verse in Old English Accents
• 6 The Writing of Sound
• 7 Music Writing and Music History in a Thirteenth-Century Song
• 8 “Where the Sì Sounds”: Dante’s Dissonant Vernaculars and Their Sensual Signs
• 9 The Phenomenology of -e
• 10 Writing Reading Rhythm
• Contributors
• Index