Open access edition of Sounding Bodies: Acoustical Science and Musical Erotics in Victorian Literature by Shannon Draucker

FAIN: DR-301629-24

Research Foundation for the State University of New York (Albany, NY 12207-2826)
Rebecca Colesworthy (Project Director: March 2024 to present)

To support the open access edition of Sounding Bodies: Acoustical Science and Musical Erotics in Victorian Literature by Shannon Draucker.

Can the concert hall be as erotic as the bedroom? Many Victorian writers believed so. In the mid-nineteenth century, acoustical scientists such as Hermann von Helmholtz and John Tyndall described music as a set of physical vibrations that tickled the ear, excited the nerves, and precipitated muscular convulsions. In turn, writers—from canonical figures such as George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, to New Women novelists like Sarah Grand and Bertha Thomas, to anonymous authors of underground pornography—depicted bodily sensations and experiences in unusually explicit ways. These writers used scenes of music listening and performance to intervene in urgent conversations about gender and sexuality and explore issues of agency, pleasure, violence, desire, and kinship. Sounding Bodies shows how both classical music and Victorian literature, while often considered bastions of conservatism and repression, represented powerful sites for feminist and queer politics.

Associated Products

Sounding Bodies (Book)
Title: Sounding Bodies
Author: Shannon Draucker
Abstract: Can the concert hall be as erotic as the bedroom? Many Victorian writers believed so. In the mid-nineteenth century, acoustical scientists such as Hermann von Helmholtz and John Tyndall described music as a set of physical vibrations that tickled the ear, excited the nerves, and precipitated muscular convulsions. In turn, writers—from canonical figures such as George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, to New Women novelists like Sarah Grand and Bertha Thomas, to anonymous authors of underground pornography—depicted bodily sensations and experiences in unusually explicit ways. These writers used scenes of music listening and performance to intervene in urgent conversations about gender and sexuality and explore issues of agency, pleasure, violence, desire, and kinship. Sounding Bodies shows how both classical music and Victorian literature, while often considered bastions of conservatism and repression, represented powerful sites for feminist and queer politics.
Year: 2024
Primary URL: http://soar.suny.edu/handle/20.500.12648/14996
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781438498416
Copy sent to NEH?: No

---