Critical Soundings: Voice, Space and Sound in Australian Literature

Abstract

Introduction to the Critical Soundings special issue of JASAL. This special issue will consider whether it is possible to claim a distinct sonic texture for Australian literary and cultural formations. What kind of readings result from attending to the relation between silence and the colonial past in Judith Wright’s poetry, to the litany of voices in Christina Stead’s modern vision of Sydney, or the complex links between music and landscape in Tim Winton’s Western Australian coast? Extending a range of historical and theoretical work on sound into an Australian context, this special issue will explore the multiple auditory dimensions of aesthetic, literary and sonic practices in a range of historical, geographical and cultural domains.