Bloomsbury Senses of Vibration: A History of the Pleasure and Pain of Sound

This is a pioneering study of the phenomenon of vibration and its history and reception through culture. The study of the senses has become a rich topic in recent years. "Senses of Vibration" explores a wide range of sensory experience and makes a decisive new contribution to this growing field by focussing not simply on the senses as such, but on the material experience - vibration - that underpins them. This is the first book to take the theme of vibration as central, offering an interdisciplinary history of the phenomenon and its reverberations in the cultural imaginary. It tracks vibration through the work of a wide range of writers, including physiologists (who thought vibrations in the nerves delivered sensations to the brain), physicists (who claimed that light, heat, electricity and other forms of energy were vibratory), spiritualists (who figured that spiritual energies also existed in vibratory form), and poets and novelists from Coleridge to Dickens and Wells. "Senses of Vibration" is a work of scholarship that cuts through a range of disciplines and will reverberate for many years to come. Review "This book is remarkable not only for the range of its research, extraordinary though that is. It is even more impressive because of its capacity to stir its readers into genuinely imaginative thinking, a rare feat in a work of such scholarship. If we believe Charles Babbage, 'aerial pulses, unseen by the keenest eye' make of the very air around us 'one vast library' of all that has been said and done in the world. Senses of Vibration is certainly a major contribution to that library of the imagination." --Professor Philip Davis, Director of the Centre for Research into Reading, University of Liverpool. About the Author Shelley Trower is Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Hull, UK.