Chapter 4 focuses on moments of scientific and imaginative engagement with the question of what lay beyond the limits of human audibility. It begins by considering writings by Charles Babbage, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, and Florence McLandburgh, each of whom explored the possibilities of accessing the continuing sounds of ordinary life beyond the physiological boundaries of human hearing, and the potential artistic, philosophical, and spiritual truths that might be gleaned from so doing. Conversely, the second part of this chapter looks to representations of the limits of individual auditory perception as a newly recognised weakness or vulnerability in the modern subject. The gothic monsters and sensationalised beings of Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, and Wilkie Collins, were, I argue, born in part of a paranoid white imperialist mindset, for whom superior auditory perception in others might pose a distinct threat to British social and cultural structures.

Chapter 2 turns to the presence of the stethoscope in medical consultations from the perspective of the newly objectified patient, now acutely aware of, yet unable to hear or to interpret, the sounds of their own body. Horror, dread, and insight into the unknown are staples of the Victorian sensation and gothic genres, which, I argue, provided an anxious site for the medical and the imaginative to inform and disrupt one another in fictional explorations of the powers of the stethoscope. Drawing on works by Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Sheridan Le Fanu, as well as short stories and poetry from popular periodicals, this chapter demonstrates that, as medical institutions accepted new technologies and became increasingly specialised throughout the century, the stethoscope became for many patients an object of anxious contemplation, serving as a palpable interface between doctor and patient, between hope and fear, and between the visible and invisible.

This chapter argues that Irish modernism is founded on a broad notion of technology as form and an awareness of the embeddedness of technoscience in the imperial military power that supports British colonial rule. The first wave of Irish modernists, or what are referred to in the chapter as protomodernists, engaged critically with technological forms by the end of the nineteenth century, setting them alongside literary forms and evaluating them as modes of perception, engagement, and mediation. By the height of the European modernist period, Irish modernists would fully acknowledge that technoscientific development was part of a larger network of forms that could not be so easily disentangled from literary form. And all recognised those forms, this chapter argues, as ‘[organising] a situation of moral decision-making’, in the words of Peter-Paul Verbeek.

Legends about the vampire and the development of Gothic fiction took separate tracks throughout the eighteenth century in England and the rest of Europe. But they united decisively in S. T. Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ (composed 1799–1800; published 1816), which then inspired the more symbolic uses of the vampire-figure in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819). These works showed that the vampire could be a symbolic site for ‘abjecting’ (in Julia Kristeva’s sense of ‘throwing-off’) the most feared inconsistencies and conflicts at the heart of individuals and their whole culture. From there, this mating of fictive schemes, empowered by the Janus-faced nature of Gothic symbol-making, proliferated across the nineteenth century in plays, penny dreadfuls and fully-fledged novels. As these versions of the Gothic vampire progressed, so the range of deep conflicts that this figure could abject, individual and social, grew exponentially, as we can still see in texts ranging from Sir Walter Scott’s novels and Charles Nodier’s French plays in the 1810s and 1820s to Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire in the 1890s.

This chapter explores how the Gothic in the late nineteenth century can be related to the different imperial contexts of India, Egypt and America. It argues that it is important to acknowledge the specificity of different colonialisms in order to situate the Gothic of the period and to understand its political complexity. The ghost stories of Rudyard Kipling, for example, challenge many of the colonial contexts that they ostensibly work within; in turn, Kipling’s ambivalent account of India reflects a politically conflicted view of British colonialism. Colonial ambivalence is also clear in the context of Britain’s seemingly illegitimate occupation of Egypt during the period. A number of mummy stories by Grant Allen, Eva M. Henry, Arthur Conan Doyle and Kate and Hesketh Prichard, which explore this specific colonial context, are discussed. The chapter concludes with an account of Bram Stoker’s change in attitude towards America as the country becomes increasingly cast as a colonial threat in Dracula (1897) and The Lady of the Shroud (1909).

In seeking to frame reading as a multimedia event, this chapter looks back to a period in the late nineteenth century when book-makers sought in various ways to refashion their products as audiobooks, and so to undo some of the principles that characterise silent reading. In this way, the chapter elaborates on the familiar history of gramophonic storage media by uncovering a pre-history that stretches right back to the technology of Thomas Edison in the 1870s. This, then, is an experiment in media archaeology, which is alive both to forgotten and aborted attempts to make books talk, and to books that like to imagine in more vicarious ways a reading culture unencumbered by the false principles of an ‘audiovisual litany’, as Jonathan Sterne once put it. The chapter touches on a variety of material – by Edward Bellamy and Bram Stoker, and by the French science fiction writers Albert Robida and Jules Verne – and it does so with a view to showing how imaginative writers anticipated the future of sound media.

Today, Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897) is the best-known literary work that highlights the late nineteenth-century’s panoply of print and non-print media. This chapter analyzes how this focus allows the novel to set up a dialectic that has gone unremarked in previous critical accounts of it. In Dracula, gaps, losses, and incomplete translations between media become a source of uncanniness, producing the effect of the unreal and the paranormal. Yet the novel also presents the richness and particularity of multiple media giving way to the typewriter, a device that is supposed to yield that quintessentially modern substance, demediated information. With its vampiric power to feed on original media while converting and occulting them, the typewriter allows the novel to liquidate their aura of originality while keeping it hauntingly available, even undead.