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Sounding Feminine traces the development of attitudes towards the female voice that have decisively shaped modern British society and culture, examining how the responses of late 18th- and early 19th-century audiences to the sounds of women's singing exposed the intricate links between gender, nationality, class, and religion in a pivotal era of change.
List of contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Sounding Feminine
- Chapter 1: Instructing women's voices in conduct literature
- Chapter 2: Encountering women's voices in letters, diaries, and life-writing
- Chapter 3: Criticising women's voices in the musical press
- Chapter 4: Dorothea Solly's musical world: Class, religion, and the cultivation of the female voice
- Chapter 5: The lives and voices of professional female singers: three vignettes
- Epilogue: Voicing a new femininity
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
David Kennerley is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in History at Queen Mary University of London. He specializes in the history of music, sound, gender, and political culture in modern Britain. His work has been published in the Historical Journal, the English Historical Review, and the Journal of British Studies, and, with Oskar Cox Jensen and Ian Newman, he has co-edited Charles Dibdin and Late Georgian Culture (OUP, 2018).
Summary
Sounding Feminine traces the development of attitudes towards the female voice that have decisively shaped modern British society and culture, examining how the responses of late 18th- and early 19th-century audiences to the sounds of women's singing exposed the intricate links between gender, nationality, class, and religion in a pivotal era of change.
Additional text
Kennerley's book fully deserves to reach a wider readership, including anyone interested in women's history as well as historical female music cultures and debates which still resonate with women's performance to this day.
