Writing Noise in Interwar Britain: Literature and the Politics of Sound

Interwar Britain--called the 'age of noise'--witnessed a pervasive preoccupation with 'unwanted' sound. With the rising hum of air and road traffic, the roar of industry, and the reverberations of newly popular sound technologies, everyday urban din became an increasingly urgent subject of interrogation. Practitioners across the arts and sciences sought to listen in to, represent, and regulate the causes and effects of excess or disruptive sound. Noise was one of the pre-eminent frameworks for conceptualizing modernity and its effects. Writing Noise in Interwar Britain explores this multi-disciplinary preoccupation and argues for its connection to the sonic legacy of the First World War. The extreme decibel levels of the conflict brought about not only a concern with the effects of noise on minds and bodies, but a reconceptualization of the material effects of everyday sound. Modernist writers were at the forefront of this sonic-mindedness and derived creative fuel from tuning in to the noisescapes found in war zones, cities, factories, domestic spaces, and the countryside. In this way, literary fiction is not only a key source of auditory history but a site in which definitions of unwanted or resistant sound were rehearsed. Sound became noise and vice versa. This volume brings literary studies into conversation with the history of medicine, technology, and industrial psychology to demonstrate the importance of noise to understandings of technological modernity and the racial, gender, and class politics of national identity of this period. Noise is about power: its designation can be a silencing technique brought to bear on marginalized individuals or communities as much as it can be a mode of protest against those very measures.