The Soundscapes of American Realist Fiction

This essay explores the acoustic geographies of texts by Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, Rebecca Harding Davis and William Dean Howells. Drawing on the work of R. Murray Schafer and his World Soundscape Project, it analyzes the representational strategies American realist writers employ as they document and comment on the processes of industrialization and urbanization. The essay's main focus is on the politics of representing the noises of social change and conflict that constitute modernity. I am particularly interested in the varying degrees to which realist authors manage or, more often, fail to preserve something of the ineffability and recalcitrance of the noises they represent.