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

This book explores the preoccupation with 'unwanted' sound in interwar Britain. It contends that the extreme decibel levels brought about during WW1 created not only a concern with the effects of noise on the mind and body, but a reconceptualization of the material effects of sound that influenced writers.

List of contents

• Introduction


• 1: Writing War Noise: Auditory Shock and the Sonic Legacy of the First World War


• 2: 'No Needless Noise': The Biopolitics of Interwar Noise Abatement


• 3: The Sonification of Domestic Space: Radio and the 'Good Listener'


• 4: Industrial Noise, Factory Fiction, and the Sounds of Protest


• 5: Listening to 'Nature': Rural Noise, Interwar Preservation, and Forms of Sonic Nationalism


• Coda:: Writing the Blitz

About the author

Anna Snaith is Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature at King's College London. She studied at the University of Toronto (BA) and University College London (PhD) and joined the English Department at King's College London in 2003. She was Head of English between 2020 and 2022. She is a former member of the AHRC's Peer Review College and is on the editorial board of the Woolf Studies Annual, Modern Fiction Studies, and Modernism/modernity.

Product details

• Authors: Anna (Professor of Twentieth-Century Liter Snaith, Snaith Anna
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 27.11.2025
• EAN: 9780198951476
• ISBN: 978-0-19-895147-6
• No. of pages: 336
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; MEDICAL / History, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 20th Century, History of Medicine, Literary studies: from c 1900 -, Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers, Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000, LITERARY CRITICISM / Novel as Form