This chapter considers the influence of emerging technologies of audio reproduction on literature. The phonograph, also called the gramophone, was invented in 1877 by Thomas Edison; in the form of Edison cylinders and the flat discs introduced by Emile Berliner in the 1890s, sound recording was rapidly popularized in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Camlot traces the twofold nature of the literary engagements with sound recording: On the one hand, they “suggested a direct, unmediated experience of events from the past”; on the other, in drawing attention to the material limitations of this new technology, which “worked to shape the real-time sonic events it recorded,” these engagements “revealed how indebted our sense of reality is to mediating factors.”

The Irish Literary Revival at the turn of the twentieth century was heavily invested in the value of orature, characteristically associated with peasant culture as the living remnant of pre-modern society, which is typically seen as being on the verge of its final disappearance. Focusing on Augusta Gregory and W. B. Yeats, this essay resituates the relationship between orature and modernity in Irish culture in the context of technology, noting that the Revival coincides exactly with the period – from the late 1880s to the early 1920s – that saw the emergence of key technologies of sound: the telephone, the gramophone/phonograph, and later radio. A key concept here is the idea of over-lapping histories of technology; running alongside histories of technological innovation, political economy, and social change is a hidden history of technologies of sound as the ghost of oral culture, imbricated in some of the same literary narratives that memorialise the pre-modern.

Perhaps no writer was more attuned to the shape-shifting nature of sound recording technology than John Dos Passos, whose fascination with modern mass media inflected his early writing and shaped the form of his multimodal novel trilogy U.S.A. (1930, 1934, 1936). By the mid-1920s, the phonograph was no longer new and was, in fact, threatened with obsolescence by the emergence of the radio. And yet, at the same moment that radio began to encroach on the consumer market for phonographs, rapid changes were taking place in sound reproduction -- including the introduction of the condenser microphone and electrical recording -- that were reshaping the ways people would hear recorded sound. As I show, Dos Passos’s innovation was to make use of readers’ ears as highly tuned instruments for listening. But now these novels require a recuperative act of resonant reading to resurface the sonic logic of Dos Passos’s noisy prose.

In seeking to frame reading as a multimedia event, this chapter looks back to a period in the late nineteenth century when book-makers sought in various ways to refashion their products as audiobooks, and so to undo some of the principles that characterise silent reading. In this way, the chapter elaborates on the familiar history of gramophonic storage media by uncovering a pre-history that stretches right back to the technology of Thomas Edison in the 1870s. This, then, is an experiment in media archaeology, which is alive both to forgotten and aborted attempts to make books talk, and to books that like to imagine in more vicarious ways a reading culture unencumbered by the false principles of an ‘audiovisual litany’, as Jonathan Sterne once put it. The chapter touches on a variety of material – by Edward Bellamy and Bram Stoker, and by the French science fiction writers Albert Robida and Jules Verne – and it does so with a view to showing how imaginative writers anticipated the future of sound media.

In 2008, the First Sounds project digitally scanned and converted the paper tracings of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s phonautograph, recreating sounds that hadn’t been heard since the middle of the nineteenth century. Never intended to be played back, Scott’s phonautograms belong to a world in which writing was the universal standard for other media and literature was often the test case for new media technologies. But even by the time of Thomas Edison’s tinfoil phonograph in the late 1870s, that orientation was changing. This book analyzes the relationships of print literature to other media in the late nineteenth century, a time when an astonishing array of new media technologies were imagined, invented, and adopted. It argues that writers became vernacular media theorists as they traced systematic relationships between different forms of print and nonprint media, and it brings the history of books and printed writing into closer contact with the interdisciplinary field of media archaeology.