Books in the series examine the place of sound in human experience from a historical perspective, and from the broadest range of critical, theoretical, and methodological approaches. Sound in History invites work from a diverse range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts including, but not limited to, music studies, history, literary studies, and history of science; its scope is global and broadly trans-historical. The series seeks to publish work by established scholars as well as those at the beginning of their careers.
Series Editors:
Emma Dillon
Professor of Music, King’s College London
Staff Editorial Contact:
Walter Biggins, Editor-in-Chief wbiggins@upenn.edu
Speaking, Stammering, Singing, Shouting traces the history of what was considered a good, normal, or healthy voice in the nineteenth century. From parrots and preachers to stammerers and singers, the book delves not only into changing medical norms and musical ideals but also into the sometimes painful and awkward daily work of having a voice.
Edited by Emily I. Dolan, Emily MacGregor and Arman Schwartz
Price: $64.95
ISBN: 9781512828030
Pub Date: September 2025
Format: Hardcover
336 Pages
Tracing the pathways through which sound traveled across a variety of conceptual and physical domains in the first half of the twentieth century, Sonic Circulations not only proposes a new account of the role of music, sound, and voice in modern knowledge production but also poses urgent questions about technology and empire.
Jennifer Rushworth argues for a new approach to Proust’s novel, reading it as a “songbook” because of its intermittent but intense engagement with song. She uncovers multiple Proustian uses of song, and shows how these are linked by desire, memory, repetition, and different kinds of resistance.
Tekla Bude starts from a simple premise—that music requires a body to perform it—to rethink the relationship between music, matter, and the body in the late medieval period. Sonic Bodies argues that writers thought of "music" and "the body" as mutually dependent and historically determined processes that called each other into being.
Music in English and German Literature and Aesthetic Theory, 1670-1850
Miranda Eva Stanyon
Price: $75.00
ISBN: 9780812253085
Pub Date: May 2021
Format: Hardcover
304 Pages
What does the sublime sound like? Miranda Stanyon traces competing varieties of the sublime, a crucial modern aesthetic category, as shaped by the antagonistic intimacies between music and language. In resounding the history of the sublime over the course of the long eighteenth century, she finds a phenomenon always already resonant.
