Noisy Isles: Sounds and Otherness in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature.
Noisy Isles: Sounds and Otherness in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature.
Date
2018-05
Authors
Sophonpanich, Rawitawan
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English
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Abstract
This dissertation explores the representations of sounds in medieval and early modern
English literature. Such representations reveal that despite the attempts of the English
government to exert hegemony over other polities and peoples on the Atlantic archipelago as
well as to centralize jurisdictional and political authority, diversity and heterogeneity still
existed, persisted, and resisted. Many times such diversity and resistance have been manifested
in sonic forms, such as war cries of the Irish, or the protesting noises of the peasants from the
countryside. These sounds were considered as dissonance and disturbing to the harmonious state
that the English government had attempted to construct and impose upon its subjects. This
condition perpetuated several medieval and early modern English writers to code and castigate
such disturbing sounds as meaningless and threatening noises, even though they always
contained meanings for both the speakers and their intended audiences. In so doing, this study
contends that even though sound has been long overlooked in literary studies due to the
prioritization of vision and visual representations, sound is a powerful tool that humans utilize to
unite, divide, colonize, and decolonize one another.
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Medieval,
Early Modern,
Sound Studies,
History of the Senses
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