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Chapter 7 - Noise

from Part II - Development

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 May 2020

Anna Snaith
Affiliation:
King's College London
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Summary

This chapter examines noise in literature. Rather than attempt to trace the myriad ways in which ‘noise’ has entered into literary works, the chapter deals with literature’s relationship to what Aldous Huxley described as the ‘age of noise’, the particular acoustic conditions produced by the modern mechanical environments and media forms of the early twentieth century. The ‘age of noise’ was acoustic – produced by factories, cars, gramophones and wireless sets – but it was also a widely circulating social discourse used to make sense of, and argue about, the perils and possibilities of the modern age. The chapter argues that writers played a central role in narrating the ‘age of noise.’ Writers who were concerned with noise in the early twentieth century, such as Georges Duhamel, not only translated the sounds of modern societies into language but also shaped the social politics of noise, playing an important part in defining what, and who, was labelled as noisy.

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Sound and Literature , pp. 154 - 169
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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  • Noise
  • Edited by Anna Snaith, King's College London
  • Book: Sound and Literature
  • Online publication: 29 May 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108855532.008
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  • Noise
  • Edited by Anna Snaith, King's College London
  • Book: Sound and Literature
  • Online publication: 29 May 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108855532.008
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Noise
  • Edited by Anna Snaith, King's College London
  • Book: Sound and Literature
  • Online publication: 29 May 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108855532.008
Available formats
×