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.
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.
Inhoudsopgave
List of IllustrationsAcknowledgments
Introduction The Erotic Symphony
Part One: Sounds and Bodies
1. Hearing, Touching, Feeling Sound: Acoustical Science in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Part Two: Genders
2. Bare Arms and Quivering Nerves: The ‘Lady Violinist’ Novels of Mary Augusta Ward and M. E. Francis
3.Cross-Dressing Violinists and Music/Gender Performance in
The Heavenly Twins and The Violin-Player
Part Three: Sexualities
4. Dangerous Vibrations: Musical Rape in George Eliot and Thomas Hardy
5. Orgasm in the Orchestra Box: Teleny’s Musical Pornography
Part Four: Intimacies
6. Fiddle Feelings: Human-Instrument Intimacies in Dickens, Eliot, Trollope, and Hardy
7. Musical Hauntings and Otherworldly Erotics in
The Lost Stradivarius and ‘A Wicked Voice’
Coda Re-vitalizing Contemporary Classical Music
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Over de auteur
Shannon Draucker is Assistant Professor of English at Siena College.
Taal Engels ● Formaat EPUB ● Pagina’s 294 ● ISBN 9781438498393 ● Uitgeverij State University of New York Press ● Gepubliceerd 2024 ● Downloadbare 24 maanden ● Valuta EUR ● ID 9296490 ● Kopieerbeveiliging Adobe DRM
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