Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings

By Jason Camlot

Phonopoetics tells the neglected story of early "talking records" and their significance for literature, from the 1877 invention of the phonograph to some of the first recorded performances of modernist works. The book challenges assumptions of much contemporary criticism by taking the recorded, oral performance as its primary object of analysis and by exploring the historically specific convergences between audio recording technologies, media formats, generic forms, and the institutions and practices surrounding the literary. Opening with an argument that the earliest spoken recordings were a mediated extension of Victorian reading and elocutionary culture, Jason Camlot explains the literary significance of these pre-tape era voice artifacts by analyzing early promotional fantasies about the phonograph as a new kind of speaker and detailing initiatives to deploy it as a pedagogical tool to heighten literary experience. Through historically-grounded interpretations of Dickens impersonators to recitations of Tennyson to T.S. Eliot's experimental readings of "The Waste Land" and of a great variety of voices and media in between, this first critical history of the earliest literary sound recordings offers an unusual perspective on the transition from the Victorian to modern periods and sheds new light on our own digitally mediated relationship to the past.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Jun 11, 2019
• ISBN: 9781503609716

Book preview

PHONO • POETICS

The Making of Early Literary Recordings

JASON CAMLOT

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

© 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Camlot, Jason, 1967– author.

Title: Phonopoetics : the making of early literary recordings / Jason Camlot.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018042110 (print) | LCCN 2018058290 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503609716 | ISBN 9781503605213 (cloth : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: English literature—Audio adaptations—History and criticism. | Literature and technology—History. | Sound recordings—History. | Oral interpretation—History. | Phonograph—History.

Classification: LCC PR149.A93 (ebook) | LCC PR149.A93 C36 2019 (print) | DDC 820.9/008—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018042110

Cover Design: Kevin Barrett Kane

Cover Image: Phonograph horn from the Musée des Ondes Emile Berliner collection.

Photograph by Heather Pepper.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

List of Figures and Table

List of Recordings

Introduction: Audiotextual Criticism

1. The Voice of the Phonograph

2. Charles Dickens in Three Minutes or Less: Early Phonographic Fiction

3. Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Spectral Energy: Historical Intonation in Dramatic Recitation

4. T. S. Eliot’s Recorded Experiments in Modernist Verse Speaking

Conclusion: Analog, Digital, Conceptual

Notes

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THIS BOOK HAS been produced with the support of a great number of organizations and institutions and many great colleagues and friends. Research on sound and recorded literary performance is perhaps best delivered in a live conference or symposium setting where recordings can be played, visualized, mimicked by the speaker, and discussed in situ. I have benefitted enormously over the past two decades from opportunities to present my research on early spoken recordings and methods of digital engagement with such recordings at numerous scholarly conferences. I gratefully acknowledge the following associations and conferences that have provided platforms for sharing, testing, and recalibrating my approach to phonopoetics: the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) (2017, 2013, 2011, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2004), Modern Language Association (2017), Society for the History of Authorship, Research and Publishing (SHARP) (2016, 2004, 2000), Humanities Online Research and Education Symposium, Purdue University (2016), Canadian Society of Digital Humanities (2015), Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada (2012), American Culture Association (ACA) (2012, 2007), Popular Culture Association (PCA) (2011, 2006), Click on Knowledge Conference, University of Copenhagen (2011); Forms of Science in 19c Britain Conference, McGill University (2008), Modernist Studies Association (2004), International Gothic Association / Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (2004), Victorian Soundings conference, University of California, Santa Cruz (2003), American Studies Association (2001), and the Northeastern Victorian Studies Association (1999).

I have also benefitted significantly from invitations to present my work in plenary and workshopping situations. For these opportunities I am most grateful to Tina Choi and her many great colleagues of the Victorian Studies Association of Ontario for an invitation to serve as a plenary at the VSAO annual conference in Toronto, April 29, 2017; Justin Tackett and colleagues involved in the Stanford Humanities Center’s Material Imagination Series at which I presented a seminar, March 10, 2017; Christopher Keep and Organizers of the 2014 NAVSA conference in Western Ontario at which I delivered a seminar; Karis Shearer for the invitation to present a keynote address on phonopoetical methods at the Poetry Off the Page, Editing Modernism in Canada (EMiCs) conference, University of British Columbia, Okanagan, August 2, 2013; Matthew Rubery and his colleagues and graduate students at Queen Mary University, London, for hosting me as a visiting scholar in residence and engaging with several workshops and lectures I delivered there in May 2013; Regenia Gagnier, Paul Young, and colleagues at the University of Exeter for hosting a talk on digital approaches to early spoken recordings in May 2013; James Emmott and colleagues associated with the London Nineteenth-Century Studies Seminar for hosting a presentation at the Institute of English Studies, London, May 25, 2013; Al Filreis and Steve Evans for inviting me to share the stage with them for a panel on literary sound archives as part of the Beyond the Text: Literary Archives in the 21st Century gathering at the Beinecke Library and Whitman Humanities Center, Yale University, April 26, 2013; Jessica Riddell and Linda Morra for inviting me to present my research in a plenary talk before a great crowd of emerging undergraduate scholars at the Quebec Universities English Undergraduate Conference (QUEUC) conference, Bishop’s University, Lennoxville, QC, March 26, 2010; Audrey Jaffe, and my many wonderful colleagues at the University of Toronto for inviting me to present work in progress at their regular WINCS seminar, March 24, 2010; Alessandro Porco for hosting me as a plenary speaker at the Pop Goes the Poem graduate student conference, SUNY, Buffalo, March 23, 2007; and John Picker and Leah Price for hosting me as an invited lecturer at the Harvard University Humanities Center, April 27, 2006.

It is clear from the lists above that for the past decade, NAVSA events have served as a near annual venue for the development of this research on early spoken recordings. This association and its members represent the best interdisciplinary community of scholars I could have hoped for to test out my ideas since this project began. I wish to acknowledge my many NAVSA-associated colleagues and friends, and my wider circle of research collaborators, for the inspiring research they have shared, and in many cases for the great feedback, conversations, and support they have provided to this project over the years. In particular I thank: Emily Allen, Laurel Brake, James Buzard, Mary Wilson Carpenter, Tanya Clement, Alison Chapman, Bassam Chiblack, Tina Choi, Jay Clayton, Eleanor Courtemanche, Dennis Dennisoff, Michael Eberle-Sinatra, Andrew Elfenbein, Jennifer Esmail, Patrick Feaster, Dino Felluga, Renee Fox, Regenia Gagnier, Barbara Gelpi, Lisa Gitelman, Daniel Hack, Steven High, Jayne Hildebrand, Natalie Houston, Priti Joshi, Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Ivan Kreilkamp, Christopher Keep, Barbara Leckie, Mary-Elizabeth Leighton, Margaret Linley, Diana Maltz, Jill Matus, Richard Menke, Helena Michie, Monique Morgan, Linda Morra, Annie Murray, Chris Mustazza, Daniel Novak, Marjorie Perloff, John Picker, Charles Reiss, Catherine Robson, Matthew Rubery, Jonathan Rose, Jonathan Sterne, Simon Reader, David Seubert, Lisa Surridge, Joanna Swafford, Jennifer Terni, Marlene Tromp, Chip Tucker, Jeremy Valentine, Sharon Aranofsky Weltman, and Jared Wiercinski.

Research in the form of archival visits and conference travel that led to this book could not have been accomplished without the generous support I have received from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Le Fonds de recherche du Québec—Société et culture, and from both the vice-president of Research and Graduate Studies, and the Faculty of Arts and Science, at Concordia University. My colleagues and students, past and present, in the Department of English at Concordia University have provided an ongoing environment of collegiality and intelligence that has made my research and teaching stronger and more enjoyable. I am grateful for the intellectual and moral support I have received for this research project from Sally Brooke Cameron, Jill Didur, Mary Esteve, Meredith Evans, Deanna Fong, Marcie Frank, Andre Furlani, Judith Herz, Patrick Leroux, Katherine McLeod, John Miller, Omri Moses, Nicola Nixon, Kevin Pask, Jonathan Sachs, Manish Sharma, and Darren Wershler, among many others. Other colleagues at Concordia have provided support and inspiration even at the seemingly least-inspiring times (as when serving on administrative committees). For their support of my research by other means I would like to acknowledge Richard Bernier, Bonnie-Jean Campbell, John Capobianco, Emilie Champagne, Miranda D’Amico, Nadia D’Arienzo, Sharon Frank, Paul Joyce, Bradley Nelson, Andre Roy, Kim Sawchuck, Rae Staseson, Esther Ste-Croix, and Soheyla Salari.

Earlier versions of portions of this work have appeared in the following venues under the following titles: Early Talking Books: Spoken Recordings and Recitation Anthologies, 1880–1920, Book History 6 (2003): 147–73; Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ (1854), Victorian Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Victorian Studies 35 (2009): 27–32; The Three Minute Victorian Novel: Early Adaptations of Books to Sound, Audiobooks, Sound Studies and Literature, ed. Matthew Rubery (New York: Routledge, 2011), 24–43; and Historicist Audio Forensics: The Archive of Voices as Repository of Material and Conceptual Artifacts, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 21 (2015): n.p. (21 pages), http://doi.org/10.16995/ntn.744.

I am grateful to the readers of the manuscript I submitted to the Press for their invaluable comments and recommendations. Their insights challenged and inspired me as I revised the book for final submission. James Taylor and Deanna Fong were of great assistance in preparing and formatting images for the book, and Faith Wilson Stein of Stanford University Press provided expert guidance throughout the production process. I am most grateful to Emily-Jane Cohen who has been unwavering in her support of this project, and who has seen it through the entire editorial process with great insight, humor, and generosity. Thank you EJC.

Nothing would be written, or worth writing, without my extended family and friends. Thank you Matt, Arj, and Heather (who took photos at the Musée des Ondes, Emile Berliner in Montréal for the cover), and our beloved friend Adam, who would have been so proud of this book, and to whose memory it is dedicated. Cory, Oscar, and Nava, my loves and my life.

FIGURES AND TABLE

Figures

1. Advertisement for The Reginaphone

2. Advertisement from 1898, in which The Gramophone speaks a riddle

3. Robert J. Wildhack cartoon illustrating Snores and Sneezes

4. Photograph of Victrola used in classroom teaching

5. Catalogue pages depicting William Sterling Battis Dickens Man recordings

6. Record catalogue description of A Dramatic Recitation by Rose Coghlan

7. Praat interval annotation showing tremor and prolongation pitch contours in Lewis Waller’s recitation of The Charge of the Light Brigade

8. Praat interval annotation showing tremor and prolongation pitch contours in Canon Fleming’s recitation of The Charge of the Light Brigade

9. Praat interval annotation showing tremor and prolongation pitch contours in Henry Ainley’s recitation of The Charge of the Light Brigade

10. Detail depicting degrees of force in vocal expression

11. Chart depicting vocal force, form, and quality

12. Praat interval annotation showing pitch contours in Henry Ainley’s delivery of the words he said

13. Multitrack comparison of wave forms, T. S. Eliot reading The Burial of the Dead

14. Praat annotated visualization of Robert Speaight reading Death by Water

15. Praat annotated visualization of T. S. Eliot reading Death by Water

16. Praat annotated visualization of T. S. Eliot reading Burial of the Dead depicting excessive intonation curves

17. Praat annotated visualization of T. S. Eliot reading Burial of the Dead depicting truncated intonation curves

Table

T. S. Eliot’s multiple 1933 instantaneous disc recordings of The Waste Land

RECORDINGS

RECORDINGS AVAILABLE FOR listening at the Stanford University Press Phonopoetics website, https://www.sup.org/phonopoetics, are distinguished in boldface throughout the text.

Introduction

Alfred Tennyson, The Charge of the Light Brigade. Alfred Tennyson, performer. Pre-commercial cylinder, 1890.

George Bernard Shaw, Spoken English and Broken English. Linguaphone, SH 1E, 12" record, 1927.

Chapter 1

Florence Nightingale, When I am no longer a memory . . . Introduced by Mary Helen Ferguson. Florence Nightingale, speaker. Non-commercial brown wax cylinder, July 30, 1890.

Horatio Nelson Powers, The Phonograph’s Salutation. Horatio Nelson Powers, performer. Wax cylinder, 1888.

I am The Edison Phonograph. Len Spencer, performer. Advertising Record. Edison black wax cylinder, 1906.

Sally Stembler, and Edward Meeker, Laughing Record (Henry’s Music Lesson). Sally Stembler and Edward Meeker, performers. Edison 51063-R, 1923.

Robert J. Wildhack, Sneezes. Robert J. Wildhack, performer. Victor 35590-B, shellac 12" disc, 78 rpm, January 1917.

Robert J. Wildhack, Snores. Robert J. Wildhack, performer. Victor 35590-A, shellac 12" disc, 78 rpm, January 1917.

Cohen on His Honeymoon. Monroe Silver, performer. Edison Diamond Disc Record 7154, 1920.

Cohen on the Telephone. Joe Hayman, performer. Columbia, A1516, 1913.

What I Heard at the Vaudeville. Len Spencer, performer. Edison Gold molded record 8693, 1904/5.

Drama in One Act. George Graham, performer. Berliner 627Z, 1896.

A Study in Mimicry—Vaudeville. Introduced by Len Spencer. John Orren and Lillian Drew, performers. Edison 50485-R, 1918.

Chapter 2

Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Flogging Scene). Len Spencer, performer. Edison Standard 8656, 1904.

The Transformation Scene from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Len Spencer, performer. Columbia matrix, [1904] 1908.

Svengali Mesmerizes Trilby. Herbert Beerbohm Tree, performer. Gramophone concert record, 10" Black Label disc, GC 1313, 1906.

The Late Sir Henry Irving in The Dream Scene From ‘The Bells’ (Leopold Lewis): Dramatic Recital by Bransby Williams. Bransby Williams, performer. Columbia 408, 12" disc, 1913.

A Christmas Carol in Prose (Charles Dickens): Scrooge’s awakening (w Carol Singers [male quartet]). Bransby Williams, performer. Edison 13353, 1905.

The Awakening of Scrooge. Bransby Williams, performer. Edison Amberol 12378, 1911.

A Christmas Carol—Scrooge—After the Dream. Bransby Williams, performer. Columbia 6277, 1912/1924.

A Christmas Carol—Bob Cratchit Telling of Scrooge (Dickens). Bransby Williams, Performer. HMV 2632f 01012, 1912.

David Copperfield (Charles Dickens)—Wilkins Micawber’s Advice. Bransby Williams, performer. Edison cylinder 13508, 1906.

Micawber (from ‘David Copperfield’). William Sterling Battis, performer. Victor 35556 B, 12" disc, 1916.

Chapter 3

Alfred Tennyson, The Charge of the Light Brigade. Alfred Tennyson, performer. Non-commercial cylinder, 1890.

Alfred Tennyson, The Charge of the Light Brigade. Rose Coghlan, performer. Victor 31728, 12" shellac disc, 1909.

Alfred Tennyson, The Charge of the Light Brigade. Edgar L. Davenport, performer. United Talking Machine Co. A1371, 10" shellac disc, 1913.

Alfred Tennyson, The Charge of the Light Brigade. Performer unknown. Emerson Phonograph Co. 755, 7" disc, ca. 1917.

Alfred Tennyson, The Charge of the Light Brigade. Lewis Waller, performer. HMVE164, ca. 1907.

Alfred Tennyson, The Charge of the Light Brigade. Canon Fleming, performer. HMV E-160, 10" shellac disc, 1910.

Alfred Tennyson, The Charge of the Light Brigade. Henry Ainley, performer. The Gramophone Co., B393, 10" disc, 1912.

Chapter 4

T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land. Robert Speaight, performer. New Rochelle, N.Y.: Spoken Arts, LP Record, 1956.

T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land. T. S. Eliot, performer. Instantaneous discs / audio tape. Brander Matthews Dramatic Museum Collection, Library of Congress, ca. 1933.

T. S. Eliot, T. S. Eliot Reading His Own Poems. 78 rpm mono 12" records, 1946. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress Recording Laboratory, 1949.

Conclusion

Au clair de la lune. Phonotogram, April 9, 1860, Digital sonification, March 2008. www.firstsounds.org/sounds/earlier-playback.php#auclair.

INTRODUCTION

Audiotextual Criticism

THE EXPERIENCE OF listening to an old, spoken recording is nothing less than strange. Listen to the voice of Alfred Tennyson reading his poem The Charge of the Light Brigade recorded on an Edison phonograph cylinder in 1890. The sound recording of Tennyson’s voice is strange for many reasons:

(1) It does something strange. It’s weird to have sound emanating from someone thought dead and gone forever (except for the immortality of Tennyson’s poetry, of course) resonate, vibrate through the air, and trigger our ears with physical pressure, creating the disembodiment and teleportation phenomena that Jeffrey Sconce associates with electronic presence in what he calls haunted media.¹

(2) It sounds strange. Aside from the strangeness of hearing the voice of a dead person, the recording itself does not sound normal to us. The audio signal we are getting is not clear or intelligible, according to our present standards of fidelity for audio playback, because we are listening to a digitized version of sound recorded on a late Victorian brown wax cylinder. The particular cylinder used in this recording was not preserved according to best archival practices either. It was stored at the back of a South African barn from 1890 until the 1960s, losing some of its shape over time and adding an additional curve to the sound, distorting the voice of the poet eerily.² Some of the sound distortions include collateral noise, crackle, and a muffled hum. This noise of the wax cylinder is the voice of the medium itself, audible media-archeological information (about the physically real event).³ It communicates a past temporal presence, and the substances used to capture and preserve it. The strangeness of this effect is compounded because the actual material at the source of these sounds (the curved voice, the noise of wax) is communicated in the absence of the cylinder itself. That sound has long since migrated from the cylinder into a laptop computer. Without the material artifact before our eyes, without a metal stylus navigating the hills and dales of the wax surface of the cylinder’s body, we are not in a position to attribute what we are hearing to its material source, and there is a certain dissonance between the crackling signal, which suggests a tangible source for the sound, and the digital software and hardware by which we reproduce it in the present. This recording’s status as an aural object—a phrase reflecting our inclination to attribute the aural profile of a sound to a corresponding material object—is unclear, estranging (us from) the sound we hear.⁴

(3) It contains strange sounds. There are unidentifiable sounds on the recording, not attributable to voice, that make the audio artifact even weirder. Starting from about 1:33 into the recording, we hear a loud banging sound. Is this a defect in the cylinder evoking human action (a knock on the door?) from the time when the recording was made? Is it Tennyson getting carried away with his recitation, banging on the table as he performs (as one scholar proposes in his interpretation of the recording)?⁵ Or is it (more likely) the amplification of a crack in the cylinder that we have integrated into our listening narrative of the recording, just as listeners at early phonograph exhibitions are reported to have interpreted thumps and roars arising from flaws in a cylinder to foot-tapping or mechanical sound effects?⁶ We can’t tell what we hear. Our inability to attribute aspects of the signal to a material source and our natural inclination to integrate such aspects of the signal into our narrative of listening reveals our inherent desire, our need, for a legitimate source.

(4) It is strangely disconnected or fugitive. In fact, we cannot tell much at all from listening to this sound recording about the context in which the recording was made. The knocking sound may make us ask what Tennyson was doing while he was making this recording, but the sound recording as a whole prompts a broader version of this question: What was he doing, making this recording? The voice stripped of its social and material contexts estranges the signal for us when we hear it again in our own immediate space. So many early sound recordings are strange because they come to us as fugitive signals from another place, increasingly via digital media, stripped of their own informing spaces, situations, and reasons, and ripped from their original media formats.⁷ The idea of the status of the fugitive, ephemeral entity preoccupied the inventors of early sound-recording technologies as they worked to develop a means of capturing previously fugitive sounds, voices, and events for the long term. As James Lastra has argued, those who first experimented with sound recording and preservation through phonographic methods were engaged in a process of inverting the frameworks that informed our attention to substances: By preserving the purely contingent, these phonographic systems effectively reversed the rational hierarchy between the essential and inessential, between substance and accident.⁸ As historically postliminary listeners and as researchers, we are presented with the challenge of restoring some of the most basic information that is needed to understand the meaning of a sound after the fact of its occurrence. The repeatable sound signal does not always explain itself.

(5) It is strangely real. For all this missing information, when we hear a historical voice recording, when we listen to Tennyson read The Charge of The Light Brigade again, over a century and a quarter after he recited it into a phonograph, there is something very real about it. The real-time quality of recorded sound, that it puts us into time that has already passed and opens a tunnel connection with the past, triggers what the philosopher Wolfgang Ernst has called the drama of time-critical media.⁹ An encounter with recorded sound develops as an experience of real-time processing. The listener gets the sense that the overheard time frame is somehow alive in the present, replicating the live sonic event of which it is apparently a real-time reproduction. Sound recording works on human perception itself, and on our perception of time, in particular. Ernst’s argument about the strange drama of sound recording is based on his idea that we are not cognitively equipped to process events from two temporal dimensions simultaneously. When we immerse ourselves in real-time sound, we perceive it as live and this jars our awareness of time.

The strange distortions in the signal I have been describing are offshoots of the fact that sound recording is a time-based medium, and we, as humans, are time-sensitive listening creatures. If the timing of a voice is off, we are pretty quick to notice. If your friend’s voice sharing a story with you at a café began to accelerate and rise in pitch in a manner that emulates an LP record (meant to be played at 331/3 revolutions per minute [rpm]) being played at 45 or 78 rpm, you would begin to question your perception of reality. There were variable standards for recording and playback speeds from 1890, when Tennyson made his early literary recordings, to the 1920s. The speed at which a recording was made had an impact on the sound quality, volume, and, of course, the potential duration of a record.¹⁰ As sound recording became increasingly commercialized as a technology, with set record formats, firmer standards were developed, but as late as the 1920s, the playback device that controlled the speed of replay (sometimes referred to as the governor) might require regular adjustment. In an amusing recording entitled Spoken English and Broken English (1927), George Bernard Shaw illustrates the sensitivity that informs our perception of time in relation to the sound recorded voice, noting that attention to the screw, which regulates the speed may be necessary to realize the true vocal presence of the speaker whose voice has been recorded.¹¹ Technical knowledge and adjustments in the present are required to calibrate the signal for it to be perceived as a plausibly real emanation from the past.

The present book is about how to engage critically with early sound recordings as literary works. The audible strangeness of such sound recordings, which I have begun to identify and explain, represents a safeguard against such critical analysis. I sympathize with the recordings. I want to keep them weird, to preserve their status as objects of wonder. But at the same time, I am interested in learning more about them, how and why they were made, circulated, categorized, used, preserved, written about, discarded, rediscovered, copied, then circulated, used and categorized again. To think critically about sound recordings as literary works, we need to explore the historically specific convergences between audio-recording technologies, media formats, and the institutions and practices of the literary context.

Phonopoetics as a concept refers to the emergence and making (poesis) of literary speech sounds (phono) as they can be heard in early spoken recordings. That such sounds were apprehended (captured) on replayable records allows us to apprehend (understand) their literary historical significance. It is one of my working assumptions that temporal specificity—the location of a sound recording within a specific historical context—is key to understanding the meaning of any literary sound recording. In order to make sense of particular sound recordings produced during the acoustic and electrical periods, many different kinds of them must be considered. My own area of interest in historical audiotexts relates especially to the meaning of the literary as an informing framework and ideology of audiotextual production and use. Considering the concept of the literary in relation to early spoken recordings demands a sociological approach, since the project necessarily challenges the sequence of restrictive criteria that have been placed on the concept of literature since the nineteenth century. As Raymond Williams pointed out long ago, literature as a professional concept was governed first by a restriction to printed texts, then a narrowing to what are called ‘imaginative’ works, and then finally [by] a circumscription to a critically established minority of ‘canonical’ texts.¹² Early literary recordings in the sense in which I propose we use the term, on the other hand, are not printed, only occasionally imaginative in the high literary sense, and often would not have qualified as canonical when they first appeared, or have done so at any time since. The literary recording in the widest sense helped mobilize an ideology and practical engagement with sounds that were associated with ideas of literary performance, experience, and enculturation. These sounds might be of an elocutionist reciting Tennyson or an actor declaiming Shakespeare, but they might also be of a preacher reading a passage from the King James Bible, or a professional recording artist performing a sketch in dialect. The early literary recording is the result of the social and cultural forces that produced it and informed its meaning for the people who used it, and, as D. F. McKenzie has argued, the diverse forms of record and communication that we study are not disparate but interdependent, whether at any one time or successively down through the years.¹³

My approach to the literary historical study of the audiotext does not identify the literary nature of a sound recording exclusively with particular, extrinsically identifiable qualities of the sound signal under examination, and even less so with the imagined intentions of the performative reader whose voice and performance we may now study in the form of an audiotext, but rather with a diverse range of psychological, ideological, institutional, aesthetic, and social associations that informed that recorded signal’s production and subsequent use. Research concerning the informing theories and techniques of performance heard in a literary recording are indeed of significant interest to audiotextual criticism. However, these elements discerned in an audiotextual signal should not be approached wholly from the perspective of the