THE ANCIENT PHONOGRAPH

In The Ancient Phonograph Shane Butler takes us back to an age, long before Edison, when writing itself was still relatively new. He meticulously reconstructs a series of Greek and Roman soundscapes ranging from Aristotle to Augustine. Here the real voices of tragic actors, ambitious orators, and singing emperors blend with the imagined voices of lovesick nymphs, tormented heroes, and angry gods.

Butler offers an ambitious attempt to rethink the voice - as an anatomical prsence, a conceptual category, and a source of pleasure and wonder. He carefully and critically assesses the strenghts and limits of recent theoretical approaches to the voice and makes a rich and provocative range of ancient material available for the first time for students and scholars in voice studies, sound studies, and media theory. The Ancient Phonograph will not only appeal to classicists but to anyone interested in the verbal arts - literature, oratory, song - and the nature of aesthetic experience.