Noisy Isles: Sounds and Otherness in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature

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.