Modernist Noisescapes: Writing Sound in Interwar Britain
When:
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Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
The regulation, definition and right to make noise have long been subjects of intense debate. This talk will investigate the contested narratives of a particular chapter in this history. Interwar Britain, called the ‘age of noise’ by Aldous Huxley, saw a pervasive and multi-disciplinary preoccupation with noise. Practitioners across the arts and sciences sought to listen in to, represent and regulate the causes and effects of noise. The Anti-Noise League (1933) sought to raise public awareness about ‘needless’ noise and its effects on the nation’s nerves. The League presented noise, for the first time, as a public health issue, both synonymous with modernity and a cynosure for the deleterious effects of technological advance. I contend that this preoccupation is a sonic legacy of the auditory bombardment of the First World War. The extreme decibel levels of the conflict brought about a reconceptualization of the material effects of sound. Everyday urban din became an increasingly urgent subject of interrogation. This talk will explore the politics of this preoccupation and posit that modernist writers were at the forefront of this sonic-mindedness. Literary fiction is not only a key source of auditory history but a site in which the competing understandings of noise were rehearsed. My key exhibit will be Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway: a novel about noise which registers the healing and connective properties of sound as well as the continued sense of sound as physically injurious and traumatic.
This is a Bloomsbury Research Lecture
Contact name: Sue Wiseman
Speakers-
Professor Ann Snaith
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Anna Snaith is Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature at King’s College London. She has published widely on Virginia Woolf, global modernisms and literary sound studies. Her publications include Virginia Woolf: Public and Private Negotiations (Palgrave 2000), Modernist Voyages (Cambridge University Press 2014), a scholarly edition of The Years for the Cambridge University Press Edition of Virginia Woolf (2012), an edition of A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas (Oxford World’s Classics 2015) and an edited volume on Sound and Literature (CUP 2020). Her latest Leverhulme-funded monograph is Writing Noise in Interwar Britain: Literature and the Politics of Sound (Oxford University Press, 2025). She co-organised, with Helen Tyson and Clara Jones, the 34th Annual International Virginia Woolf Conference at King’s and Sussex in July 2025, and is the co-director of WoolfNotes.
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