Modernism and the Challenge of Aurality

Joshua Epstein's Sublime Noise: Musical Culture and the Modernist Writer and Adrianna Varga's Virginia Woolf and Music consider the resonances and dissonances between literature, music, sound, and noise in modernism. Epstein provides a broad and politically-inflected study of twentieth century literature's engagements with contemporary music, and the sounds and noises introduced by modern technologies and industrial developments. Varga's book, a collection of eleven essays, elucidates the importance of music to the Virginia Woolf and its complicated role in informing and shaping her literary work. Together, these books make a compelling contribution to an increasingly interdisciplinary field of modernist studies, while broadening our understanding of the aesthetic and socio-political importance of the aural to the development of modernist literary culture.