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1 results

  • Chapter 4 - At the Limits of Audibility

  • from Part II
  • Melissa Dickson, University of Queensland
  • Book:
    Acoustics in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Science
    Published online:
    13 December 2024
    Print publication:
    19 December 2024, pp 79-104

  • Summary

    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.