Introduction: New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies

The sound of literature is now discernible as never before. This emerging discernibility inciting new sonic approaches to literature is due, in the first instance, to digitized audio assets and online environments that make previously analog collections of literary recordings more readily available and useful for research and study. Beyond this important infrastructural condition, the heightened discernibility of sonic approaches to literary culture has arisen from a quite recent interaction and convergence of methods between literary studies and sound studies as a broad, interdisciplinary field. This continuum that now grants context for literary scholarship that focuses on sound did not exist to the same degree even fifteen years ago when Louis Cabri and Peter Quartermain produced their special issue of ESC, “On Discreteness: Event and Sound in Poetry,” a collection of scholarly work that focused primarily on the “one-hundred-plus sounds, derived from forty-plus phonemes—spoken English” as “part of poetry’s sonic dimension” (Cabri 1). Most notable in that issue was its generic focus, which made it most exciting and meaningful (and innovative from the perspective of methods) to scholars of twentiethand twenty-first century poetry. This parabolic focus on sound in poetry, arguably going back to the importance of literary prosody in New Critical close-reading methods Introduction: New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies