Voice in Motion Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern
England Gina Bloom Award for best monograph of 2007 from the
Society for the Study of Early Modern Women "An achievement. . . .
This book should be given pride of place on every feminist
bookshelf."--"Theatre Journal" "Bloom's interest in voice in the
theater is grounded in early modern ideas about the human body and
the mechanics of vocal production. The range of plays on which she
draws lets her combine new readings of canonical works with fresh
attention to less well known texts. "Voice in Motion" is a book of
interdisciplinary reach, solid scholarship, and imaginative
resonance."--Bruce Smith, University of Southern California "A
valuable addition to recent work on the history of the senses and a
significant contribution to early modern gender studies. Giving
voice to women, Bloom convincingly argues, requires examining the
cultrually-specific meanings of voice itself."--"Renaissance
Quarterly" "Meticulously researched and carefully argued."--"H-Net
Reviews" "Voice in Motion" explores the human voice as a literary,
historical, and performative motif in early modern English drama
and culture, where the voice was frequently represented as
struggling, even failing, to work. In a compelling and original
argument, Gina Bloom demonstrates that early modern ideas about the
efficacy of spoken communication spring from an understanding of
the voice's materiality. Voices can be cracked by the bodies that
produce them, scattered by winds when transmitted as breath through
their acoustic environment, stopped by clogged ears meant to
receive them, and displaced by echoic resonances. The early modern
theater underscored the voice's volatility through the use of
pubescent boy actors, whose vocal organs were especially vulnerable
to malfunction. Reading plays by Shakespeare, Marston, and their
contemporaries alongside a wide range of late sixteenth- and early
seventeenth-century texts--including anatomy books, acoustic
science treatises, Protestant sermons, music manuals, and even
translations of Ovid--Bloom maintains that cultural representations
and theatrical enactments of the voice as "unruly matter"
undermined early modern hierarchies of gender. The uncontrollable
physical voice creates anxiety for men, whose masculinity is
contingent on their capacity to discipline their voices and the
voices of their subordinates. By contrast, for women the voice is
most effective not when it is owned and mastered but when it is
relinquished to the environment beyond. There, the voice's fragile
material form assumes its full destabilizing potential and becomes
a surprising source of female power. Indeed, Bloom goes further to
query the boundary between the production and reception of vocal
sound, suggesting provocatively that it is through active
listening, not just speaking, that women on and off the stage
reshape their world. Bringing together performance theory, theater
history, theories of embodiment, and sound studies, this book makes
a significant contribution to gender studies and feminist theory by
challenging traditional conceptions of the links among voice, body,
and self. Gina Bloom teaches English at the University of Iowa.
Material Texts 2007 288 pages 6 x 9 5 illus. ISBN 978-0-8122-4006-1
Cloth $59.95s 39.00 ISBN 978-0-8122-0131-4 Ebook $59.95s 39.00
World Rights Literature Short copy: ""Voice in Motion" is a book of
interdisciplinary reach, solid scholarship, and imaginative
resonance."--Bruce Smith, University of Southern California
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