The Sound of Writing

An interdisciplinary exploration of how writers have conveyed sound through text.

Edited by Christopher Cannon and Steven Justice, The Sound of Writing explores the devices and techniques that writers have used to represent sound and how they have changed over time. Contributors consider how writing has channeled sounds as varied as the human voice and the buzzing of bees using not only alphabets but also the resources of the visual and musical arts.

Cannon and Justice have assembled a constellation of classicists, medievalists, modernists, literary historians, and musicologists to trace the sound of writing from the beginning of the Western record to poetry written in the last century. This rich series of essays considers the writings of Sappho, Simonides, Aldhem, Marcabru, Dante Alighieri, William Langland, Charles Butler, Tennyson, Gertrude Stein, and T. S. Eliot as well as poems and songs in Ancient Greek, Old and Middle English, Italian, Old French, Occitan, and modern English. The book will interest anyone curious about the way sound has been preserved in the past and the kinds of ingenuity that can recover the process of that preservation.

Essays focus on questions of language and expression, and each contributor sets out a distinct method for understanding the relationship between sound and writing. Cannon and Justice open the volume with a survey of the various ways sound has been understood as the object of our senses. Each ensuing chapter presents a case study for a sonic phenomenology at a specific time in history. With approaches from a wide variety of disciplines, The Sound of Writing analyzes writing systems and the aural dimensions of literary cultures to reconstruct historical soundscapes in vivid ways.

Christopher Cannon is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of English and Classics at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of From Literacy to Literature: England, 1300-1400 and the coeditor of The Oxford Chaucer. Steven Justice is professor emeritus of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Adam Usk's Secret.