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Full Description
A majestic literary history, revealing the power and possibilities of silence found in literary works.
Silence: A Literary History traces silences over twelve centuries of English literature, from the solitary states of exile on icy seas described in Anglo-Saxon poems to searches for silence in our own Age of Pings. This pioneering work of 'big' literary history encompasses exalted states of blissful union with the divine and with the natural world, the deep hushes of intimacy, spell-binding silent scenes on stage, encrypted expressions of same-sex love, the great literary epics of inarticulable grief, the game-changing idea of silence within the mind, the failure of words in the face of two World Wars, the hilarious awkwardness of some social silences, the echoing absence of lost voices, and silences as a powerful form of protest.
Throughout, Kate McLoughlin illuminates the intellectual and cultural influences shaping our relationships with silence and explores the paradoxical ways in which authors create silences through words. Medieval lyricists express complex theological notions through simple lullabies shushing babies to sleep. Renaissance sonneteers protest their tongue-tiedness in dazzling displays of verbal ingenuity. Shakespeare creates silences that stage violent misogyny, calculating statecraft, the hurt of having to grow up and hard-won equanimity. Out of political favour at the Restoration, Milton dreams of a silent paradise. Wordsworth and Coleridge are dumbfounded by the sublimity of God's creation. Jane Austen deflates pomposities with perfectly-timed pauses. Tennyson composes a three-thousand-line poem about the death of his best friend leaving him lost for words. Virginia Woolf repeatedly writes a novel about the things that people don't say.
In Silence: A Literary History, Kate McLoughlin explores such silences in all their richness and variety, illuminating the intellectual, cultural, political, and religious traditions that shape them. Across English literature silences emerge as powerful, moving, and sometimes very funny.
Contents
Thanks
Image Credits
Note to Readers
Introduction: Notice
1: Exile, Cradle, God
2: 1. Tongue-Tied Lovers, Coy Mistresses, Unspoken Desire
3: Shakespeare's Silences
4: Sacred Silences
Focus (i) 'A Monster for Silence': Margaret Cavendish's 'Of Silence' (1655) and The Lady Contemplation (1662)
5: The Quiet Life
6: Sage Silences
Focus (ii) 'I lay down my pen': Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (1748)
7: Sublime
8: Inexpressible Grief
9: Enough Said
10: Songs of Silent Solitude
Focus (iii) 'What They Didn't Say': Henry James's The Golden Bowl (1904)
11: Worlds Beyond Words
12: Barbaric
13: The Sound (and Look and State) of Silence
Focus (iv) 'Those Whose Voices We Cannot Hear': Jay Bernard's Surge (2019)
14: Searching for Silence in the Anthropocene
Shutting Up
Notes
Works Cited
Index
