The Sarah Siddons Audio Files

Romanticism and the Lost Voice

Subjects: Theater and Performance, Cultural Studies, Literary Studies, British and Irish Literatures
Paperback : 9780472035694, 176 pages, 17 B&W illustrations, 6 x 9, June 2013
Hardcover : 9780472117666, 176 pages, 17 B&W photographs, 6 x 9, June 2011
Ebook : 9780472027958, 184 pages, 10 black and white and 7 color Illustrations, March 2013
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Winner of the Barnard Hewitt Award and a Joe A. Callaway Award Honorable Mention

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Copyright © 2011, University of Michigan. All rights reserved.

Description

“The theatre scholar’s daunting but irresistible quest to recover some echoes of performance of the past has never been more engagingly presented than in Pascoe’s account of tracing the long-silenced voice of Sarah Siddons. Her report is a warm, witty, and highly informative exploration of the methodology and the pleasures of historical research.”
—Marvin Carlson, author of The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine

 

During her lifetime (1755–1831), English actress Sarah Siddons was an international celebrity acclaimed for her performances of tragic heroines. We know what she looked like—an endless number of artists asked her to sit for portraits and sculptures—but what of her famous voice, reported to cause audiences to hyperventilate or faint? In The Sarah Siddons Audio Files, Judith Pascoe takes readers on a journey to discover how the actor’s voice actually sounded. In lively and engaging prose, Pascoe retraces her quixotic search, which leads her to enroll in a “Voice for Actors” class, to collect Lady Macbeth voice prints, and to listen more carefully to the soundscape of her life.

Bringing together archival discoveries, sound recording history, and media theory, Pascoe shows how romantic poets’ preoccupation with voices is linked to a larger cultural anxiety about the voice’s ephemerality. The Sarah Siddons Audio Files contributes to a growing body of work on the fascinating history of sound and will engage a broad audience interested in how recording technology has altered human experience.

 

 

Judith Pascoe is Professor in the Department of English at the University of Iowa.

"Along the way, the author aptly developed her own voice—her gift for felicitous, first-person writing, still a skeptically viewed undertaking in academic monographs. . . . Pascoe succeeds in creating an account, personal and learned, of her quest . . . She spices The Sarah Siddons Audio Files with lively writing . . . a literary counterpart to Siddons’s riveting voice.”---The Chronicle of Higher Education

"Richly informed by archival research and theories of new media supplemented by first-hand experimentation, and written in a lively, first-person voice, The Sarah Siddons Audio Files is a vibrant and sure-to-be-influential work of scholarship." -- Amy Muse, Comparative Drama

"The theatre scholar's daunting but irresistible quest to recover some echoes of performance of the past has never been more engaging presented than in Pascoe's account of tracing the long-silenced voice of Sarah Siddons. Her report is a warm, witty and highly informative exploration of the methodology and the pleasures of historical research."
—Marvin Carlson, author of The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine

- Marvin Carlson

"Richly informed by archival research and theories of new media supplemented by first-hand experimentation, and written in a lively, first-person voice, The Sarah Siddons Audio Files is a vibrant and sure-to-be-influential work of scholarship."
—Amy Muse, Comparative Drama

- Amy Muse

Honorable Mention: New York University (NYU) 2012 Joe A. Callaway Prize for the Best Book on Drama or Theatre

- NYU Joe A. Callaway Prize

Winner: American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) 2012 Barnard Hewitt Award

- ASTR Barnard Hewitt Award

"...a truly inredisciplinary study that is about much more than recovering Siddons's lost voice. In her multifaceted investigations, Pascoe asks us to consider what it means to think about historical evidence in the absence of tangible documentation, an issue that theater historians have been tackling for many years, but ehich have just recently become a central interest of literary scholars." 
—Laura Engel, Women's Writing

- Laura Engel

Read: Review Voice and Speech Review | May 23, 2019
Read: Review Chronicle of Higher Education | May 16, 2011