Sounding Bodies : : Acoustical Science and Musical Erotics in Victorian Literature.

• Superior document: SUNY Series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century Series
• Author: Draucker, Shannon.
• Place / Publishing House: Albany : : State University of New York Press,, 2024.; ©2024.
• Year of Publication: 2024
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Language: English
• Series: SUNY Series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century Series
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (296 pages)

Shows how nineteenth-century discoveries in acoustical science shaped Victorian literary representations of gender, sexuality, and intimacy.

Table of Contents

Intro -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: The Erotic Symphony -- Acoustical Readings -- Listening In: Sound, Sensation, and Science in Victorian Studies -- Reembodying Victorian Sound Studies -- The Feminist and Queer Uses of Acoustical Science -- Hearing New Things: New Directions for Music-Literature Studies -- Music Beyond Metaphor -- Queering the Concert Hall -- Good Vibrations: Expanding the Erotic in Victorian Studies -- Program Notes: Plan of the Book -- Part One: Sounds and Bodies -- Chapter One: Hearing, Touching, Feeling Sound: Acoustical Science in Nineteenth-Century Britain -- Physical Acoustics -- Physiological Acoustics -- "Not Mere Vibrations": Aesthetic Debates -- Acoustical Science in Victorian Culture -- Part Two: Genders -- Chapter Two: Bare Arms and Quivering Nerves: The "Lady Violinist" Novels of Mary Augusta Ward and M. E. Francis -- The "Lady Violinist" in Victorian Literature -- "Beyond Her Muscular Power": Female Violinists in Victorian England -- Brahms in the Blood: Robert Elsmere -- "Itching" to Be Heard: The Duenna of a Genius -- Physiological Acoustics and Feminist Politics -- Chapter Three: Cross-Dressing Violinists and Music/Gender Performance in The Heavenly Twins and The Violin-Player -- "The Difference That Dress Makes": Contingent Virtuosity in The Heavenly Twins -- "A Real Genius": Triumphant Musicality in The Violin-Player -- "Without Regard to Sex" -- Part Three: Sexualities -- Chapter Four: Dangerous Vibrations: Musical Rape in George Eliot and Thomas Hardy -- "In Spite of Her Resistance": The Mill on the Floss -- "Excruciating Spasms": Desperate Remedies and "The Fiddler of the Reels" -- Chapter Five: Orgasm in the Orchestra Box: Teleny's Musical Pornography -- "Natural Tastes": Teleny's Defense of Same-Sex Desire -- Aural Sex: Teleny's Queer Erotics.

Part Four: Intimacies -- Chapter Six: Fiddle Feelings: Human-Instrument Intimacies in Dickens, Eliot, Trollope, and Hardy -- "Corporeal Co-Dependence": Human-Instrument Relations in Victorian Acoustical Science -- Sympathetic Kinship: George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss -- Cello Friendship: Anthony Trollope's The Warden -- Passioned Pulsings: Thomas Hardy's "Haunting Fingers" -- Self-Playing Instruments -- Chapter Seven: Musical Hauntings and Otherworldly Erotics in The Lost Stradivarius and "A Wicked Voice" -- "Acoustical Affinities": The Lost Stradivarius -- The Murmur of the Castrato: "A Wicked Voice" -- Is the Concert Hall Haunted? -- Coda: Re-vitalizing Contemporary Classical Music -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.