Silence: A Literary History

A majestic literary history, revealing the power and possibilities of silence found in literary works. Silence: A Literary History traces silences over twelve centuries of English literature, from the solitary states of exile on icy seas described in Anglo-Saxon poems to searches for silence in our own Age of Pings. This pioneering work of 'big' literary history encompasses exalted states of blissful union with the divine and with the natural world, the deep hushes of intimacy, spell-binding silent scenes on stage, encrypted expressions of same-sex love, the great literary epics of inarticulable grief, the game-changing idea of silence within the mind, the failure of words in the face of two World Wars, the hilarious awkwardness of some social silences, the echoing absence of lost voices, and silences as a powerful form of protest. Throughout, Kate McLoughlin illuminates the intellectual and cultural influences shaping our relationships with silence and explores the paradoxical ways in which authors create silences through words. Medieval lyricists express complex theological notions through simple lullabies shushing babies to sleep. Renaissance sonneteers protest their tongue-tiedness in dazzling displays of verbal ingenuity. Shakespeare creates silences that stage violent misogyny, calculating statecraft, the hurt of having to grow up and hard-won equanimity. Out of political favour at the Restoration, Milton dreams of a silent paradise. Wordsworth and Coleridge are dumbfounded by the sublimity of God's creation. Jane Austen deflates pomposities with perfectly-timed pauses. Tennyson composes a three-thousand-line poem about the death of his best friend leaving him lost for words. Virginia Woolf repeatedly writes a novel about the things that people don't say. In Silence: A Literary History, Kate McLoughlin explores such silences in all their richness and variety, illuminating the intellectual, cultural, political, and religious traditions that shape them. Across English literature silences emerge as powerful, moving, and sometimes very funny.

Kate McLoughlin is a Professor in English Literature at the University of Oxford. She studied for a BA in English Language and Literature at Oxford and an MPhil in Renaissance Literature at Cambridge before qualifying as a barrister. She then worked for the Government Legal Service, with stints at the European Commission in Brussels, the Conseil d'Etat in Paris and the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel, before returning to Oxford for a DPhil in English. Thereafter, she held posts at the University of Glasgow and Birkbeck, University of London. Her other books include Authoring War: The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq (2011) and Veteran Poetics: British Literature in the Age of Mass Warfare, 1790–2015 (2018) and, as editor, The Cambridge Companion to War Writing (2009) and The Modernist Party (2013). She holds a diploma in piano performance from the Royal College of Music and occasionally publishes poetry.