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TelepoeticsWriting the Phone in Literature, Culture and Theory

Edited by Sarah Jackson, Philip Leonard and Annabel Williams

Format

£100.00

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About this book

Explores how telephony has shaped and been shaped by literature

  • The first edited volume to connect literature to the telephone and its networks from the period of the telephone’s invention to the present
  • Initiates multidisciplinary conversations informed by literary criticism and theory, poetics, sound studies, material culture, media archaeology and cultural history
  • Presents exciting new readings of canonical writers on telephony including Ford Madox Ford, Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Spark and Jean Cocteau, alongside neglected figures in the field including Florence Ripley Mastin, Viet Thanh Nguyen and Jenny Offill
  • Shapes new approaches to recognised theorists of the telephone, including Avital Ronell, David Trotter and Hélène Cixous

Tapping into a wide range of the protocols, practices and forms of the telephone and its extended apparatus – from analogue to digital; from corded candlestick to flat, reflective interface; and from buzzing switchboard to encrypting scrambler phone – this volume examines how the literary telephone connects, and disrupts, our relationship with such prevalent and compelling preoccupations as desire, resistance, responsibility, surveillance, political coercion and warfare. Across seventeen chapters, it brings together readings informed by literary criticism and theory, poetics, sound studies, material culture, media archaeology and cultural history. Considering areas including the modernist lyric, mid-twentieth-century fiction, contemporary drama and video games, it establishes new approaches for understanding the extensive, and mutable, relationship between literature and the telephone.

Table of contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

Notes on Contributors

Introduction: Phone Books
Sarah Jackson, Philip Leonard and Annabel Williams

Part I. Connections and Disconnections

1. ‘Rinse and Wring the Ear’: Reflections on Being in Long-Distance Conversation
Anthony V. Capildeo

2. Genres of the Telephone, 1876–1913
Richard Menke

3. Callbacks: Death and the Telephone in Modern Drama
Kevin Riordan

4. ‘Long | Distance Calls’: The Telephone as Lyric Device in Jack Spicer and W. S. Graham
Sam Buchan-Watts

Part II. Desire, Intimacy and Affect

5. The Siren Call: Gender, Telephony and Desire in Elizabeth Bowen’s To the North
Imogen Free

6. ‘Supernatural Paraphernalia’: Ford Madox Ford’s Uncanny Telepoetics
Max Saunders

7. (H)allophonies: Cixous, Derrida and Others on the Line
Laurent Milesi

Part III. Sound and Voice

8. Voicing Class and Status in Mid-Century Fiction
Lara Ehrenfried

9. ‘The board’s asunder’: Switchboards, Operators and Phoneys in Mid-Century Fiction
Annabel Williams

10. Samuel Beckett’s Intertextual Telephony: Gender on the Line
Jivitesh Vashisht

11. ‘the telephone is overloaded’: Receiving a Feminist Telepoetics
Natalie Ferris

Part IV. Intelligence, Surveillance and Power

12. Looking for a Listener: Twentieth-Century Lyric Telephony
Tyne Daile Sumner

13. Muriel Spark’s Scrambled Telephony: Precarious Lines and Affective Disconnections
Beatriz Lopez

14. The Telephone in Pain: Impossible Confessions in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer
Sarah Jackson

Part V. Subjectivities, Mobilities and the Networked Self

15. Sleep Mode: Phones, Achievement-Subjects and the Sleep Crisis in Contemporary Literature
Diletta De Cristofaro

16. On Answering the Phone in The Stanley Parable: The Telephone-in-the-videogame, Identity and Play
Souvik Mukherjee

17. Cell Phone
Philip Leonard

Bibliography

Index

About the contributors

Sarah Jackson

Sarah Jackson is Associate Professor in Arts and Environment and Vice Chancellor’s Fellow at Northumbria University. Working at the intersections of literature, art and technology in order to address questions of social and environmental justice, her books include Pelt (2012; awarded the Seamus Heaney Prize for Poetry 2013); Tactile Poetics: Touch and Contemporary Writing (2015); and Literature and the Telephone: Conversations on Poetics, Politics and Place (2023). Bringing together creative and critical practice, her current work focuses on geopoetics, displacement and sound.

Philip Leonard

Philip Leonard is Professor of Literature and Theory at Nottingham Trent University. His research focuses on national, transnational and global writing, ecocriticism, and literature and technology. His books include Orbital Poetics: Literature, Theory, World (2019) and Literature after Globalization: Textuality, Technology, and the Nation-State (2013), and he is co-editor of Parallax special issue ‘Troubling Globalization’ (2021) and The World in Theory: Derrida, Nancy and the Ends of Globalization (forthcoming, 2026). He is currently writing a book on Earth-Space sustainability, titled Astroecologies: Cultural Narratives and Environmental Sustainability in Space.

Annabel Williams

Annabel Williams is a Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of St Andrews. Her research specialisms include literary modernism, mid-twentieth-century literature, travel writing and war writing, and she has published work on these areas in edited volumes and journals including Modernist Cultures, Textual Practice and Twentieth-Century Literature. Her essay ‘Fantasias on National Themes: Fantasy, Space, and Imperialism in Rebecca West’ won the Andrew J. Kappel Prize in Literary Criticism (2020). Her monograph Travel, War and Home in Late Modernist British Literature is forthcoming in 2026.