Romanticism and Sound Studies: Recording Romantic Relationality

This collection takes up two interrelated questions. One, how might the interdisciplinary field of sound studies change the way we engage with Romantic literature? Two, how can sound studies foment broader inquiries into a range of Romanticisms not exclusive to British Romanticism? Inspired by such thinking, the essays gathered here attest to how sound studies can uncover a multisensorial Romanticism steeped in narratives of experiential history not limited to Romantic literatures of just one place or people or time. As questions of multisensory meaning and experience arise as a red thread running across the volume, attendant questions pertaining to the stakes of human relationality both in a social sense and an environmental one become impossible to ignore. The volume stands as a fresh complement to 2008 Praxis volume edited by Susan J. Wolfson and titled "Soundings of Things Done”: The Poetry and Poetics of Sound in the Romantic Ear and Era. While those generative essays deal chiefly with “the sounding sense of Romantic poetry, both thematically (a poetics of sound) and sensually/phonically (the poetry of sound and the sound of poetry),” this volume studies sound through a wider cross-section of Romantic genres. This includes not poetry alone but also periodicals, drama, and the novel as well as governmental, musical, and scientific literature (1). And whereas the previous volume foregrounds Wordsworthian poetics and a smaller subset of authors of British Romanticism, these essays increase their reach to include a wider array of writers, German Romanticism, and extra-Romantic historical and contemporary documents on sound, voice, and song.