Overview
- Winner of the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society’s 2021 Bevington Award for Best New Book
- Demonstrates the significance of sound in cross-cultural encounters in early modern drama and travel writing
- Features QR codes in each chapter, giving readers access to sound recordings of the instruments discussed
- Appeals to students and scholars of Renaissance drama, travel literature, British literature, Shakespeare, sound and sensory studies, historical phenomenology, new materialisms, and music history
Part of the book series: New Transculturalisms, 1400–1800 (NETRANS)
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About this book
Winner of the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society's 2021 Bevington Award for Best New Book
Sounds are a vital dimension of transcultural encounters in the early modern period. Using the concept of the soundwave as a vibratory, uncanny, and transformative force, Jennifer Linhart Wood examines how sounds of foreign otherness are experienced and interpreted in cross-cultural interactions around the globe. Many of these same sounds are staged in the sonic laboratory of the English theater: rattles were shaken at Whitehall Palace and in Brazil; bells jingled in an English masque and in the New World; the Dallam organ resounded at Topkapı Palace in Istanbul and at King’s College, Cambridge; and the drum thundered across India and throughout London theaters. This book offers a new way to conceptualize intercultural contact by arguing that sounds of otherness enmesh bodies and objects in assemblages formed by sonic events, calibrating foreign otherness with thefamiliar self on the same frequency of vibration.
Sounds are a vital dimension of transcultural encounters in the early modern period. Using the concept of the soundwave as a vibratory, uncanny, and transformative force, Jennifer Linhart Wood examines how sounds of foreign otherness are experienced and interpreted in cross-cultural interactions around the globe. Many of these same sounds are staged in the sonic laboratory of the English theater: rattles were shaken at Whitehall Palace and in Brazil; bells jingled in an English masque and in the New World; the Dallam organ resounded at Topkapı Palace in Istanbul and at King’s College, Cambridge; and the drum thundered across India and throughout London theaters. This book offers a new way to conceptualize intercultural contact by arguing that sounds of otherness enmesh bodies and objects in assemblages formed by sonic events, calibrating foreign otherness with thefamiliar self on the same frequency of vibration.
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Keywords
- historical phenomenology
- new materialism
- travel literature
- soundscape
- sonic theory of Michel Serres
- sensory studies
- postcolonial studies
- otherness
- cultural exchange
- Renaissance theatre
- The Tempest
- Pericles
- New World
- early modern travel narratives
- Thomas Dallam
- English theater
- lute
- the uncanny
- soundwaves
- jingle bells
Table of contents (12 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Reviews
“This impressively wide-ranging study offers both a fresh interpretation of well-trodden texts and vibrant readings of lesser-known works. … This book is bursting with insights and, as if to illustrate how … helpful QR codes enable the reader-listener to hear the sounds under discussion. This important book offers a reassessment of how we understand the sounds of drama and the sounds of the travel narrative, begging us to reassess global sounds and their impact upon the body.” (Rachel Willie, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, Vol. 174 (259), 2022)
“In her exciting and innovative book, Wood theorizes the phenomenology of ‘sounding’ otherness both in early modern drama and travel encounters, providing an expansive model for interdisciplinary engagement across performance communities. Particularly powerful is her development of the notion of ‘sounding,’ with sections focused on specific kinds of instruments and how they would have vibrated, literallyand figuratively, in different contexts. … More expansively, Wood provides a model for how the field might move forward by bringing Indigenous Studies and Premodern Critical Race Studies into fruitful dialogue.” (MRDS, Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society, 2021)
“So intent have we been in listening for sounds in particular cultures, in particular places, at particular moments in history that we have missed the cross-cultural resonances. Wood attunes us to those vibrations in Sounding Otherness in Early Modern Drama and Travel. She ingeniously uses five kinds of instruments – rattles, bells, organs, drums, and lutes – to argue for “global listening” that connects Europe with the Ottoman Empire and the Indes East and West as well as the early modern past with the post-modern present.” (Bruce R. Smith, Dean’s Professor of English, University of Southern California, USA)“This is a remarkable and highly stimulating exploration of the significance of the sonic within early modern cross-cultural encounters. The attention paid to the bodily experience of sound and its capacity to undermine boundaries of all sorts is extremely thought-provoking. There is fascinating material here on sonic interactions between Europeans and others inmany parts of the world, and the chapter on the organ-maker Thomas Dallam’s adventures in Constantinople is riveting.” (Christopher Marsh, Professor, Queen’s University Belfast, UK)
“This book beautifully defamiliarizes our experience of sound by calling scholarly attention to sound’s intrinsically transformative and uncanny power. Attending to the soundscapes of the early modern theatre and of the world outside it, Wood documents a series of cross-cultural musical encounters that occur during travels both real and theatrical to far-away lands—travels which turn out, surprisingly, for many of the instruments involved, to be a kind of homecoming. Creative and engaging in its theoretical insights, this book will be a valuable resource for both scholars and students.” (Wes Folkerth, Associate Professor, McGill University, Canada)
“Wood’s book opens up new territory in the field of global renaissance studies by examining the much neglected soundscapes that accompanied cross-cultural encounters. A must-read for all interested in revisiting how we traditionally understand travel and theater in the early modern period. Thoroughly researched and lucidly written, Sounding Otherness takes us into the fascinating world of maracas and kettledrums that sounded in masques and plays, and to musical travels of Europeans across the globe.” (Amrita Sen, Associate Professor, The Heritage College, University of Calcutta)
“By opening our ears to the sonic uncanny of the early modern theater, this provocative book gives us new ways to hear, read, and attend to early modern drama. With the author’s unusual sensitivity to sound, and equal gift for teaching her reader, Sounding Otherness shows us how bodies, places, and cultures are intimately connected through the audible reverberations of desire.” (Douglas Bruster, The University of Texas at Austin, USA)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Jennifer Linhart Wood teaches at St. Mary’s College of Maryland and works for Shakespeare Quarterly at the Folger Shakespeare Library.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Sounding Otherness in Early Modern Drama and Travel
Book Subtitle: Uncanny Vibrations in the English Archive
Authors: Jennifer Linhart Wood
Series Title: New Transculturalisms, 1400–1800
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12224-9
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: History, History (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-12223-2Published: 08 May 2019
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-12226-3Published: 14 August 2020
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-12224-9Published: 23 April 2019
Series ISSN: 2946-5338
Series E-ISSN: 2946-5346
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XXII, 373
Number of Illustrations: 17 b/w illustrations, 10 illustrations in colour
Topics: World History, Global and Transnational History, History of Early Modern Europe, Early Modern/Renaissance Literature, Cultural History, Theatre History