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.