Telepoetics

Tapping into a wide range of the protocols, practices and forms of the telephone and its extended apparatus – from analogue to digital; from corded candlestick to flat, reflective interface; and from buzzing switchboard to encrypting scrambler phone – this volume examines how the literary telephone connects, and disrupts, our relationship with such prevalent and compelling preoccupations as desire, resistance, responsibility, surveillance, political coercion and warfare. Across seventeen chapters, it brings together readings informed by literary criticism and theory, poetics, sound studies, material culture, media archaeology and cultural history. Considering areas including the modernist lyric, mid-twentieth-century fiction, contemporary drama and video games, it establishes new approaches for understanding the extensive, and mutable, relationship between literature and the telephone.

Sarah Jackson is Associate Professor in Arts and Environment and Vice Chancellor’s Fellow at Northumbria University. Working at the intersections of literature, art and technology in order to address questions of social and environmental justice, her books include Pelt (2012; awarded the Seamus Heaney Prize for Poetry 2013); Tactile Poetics: Touch and Contemporary Writing (2015); and Literature and the Telephone: Conversations on Poetics, Politics and Place (2023). Bringing together creative and critical practice, her current work focuses on geopoetics, displacement and sound. Philip Leonard is Professor of Literature and Theory at Nottingham Trent University. His research focuses on national, transnational and global writing, ecocriticism, and literature and technology. His books include Orbital Poetics: Literature, Theory, World (2019) and Literature after Globalization: Textuality, Technology, and the Nation-State (2013), and he is co-editor of Parallax special issue ‘Troubling Globalization’ (2021) and The World in Theory: Derrida, Nancy and the Ends of Globalization (forthcoming, 2026). He is currently writing a book on Earth-Space sustainability, titled Astroecologies: Cultural Narratives and Environmental Sustainability in Space. Annabel Williams is a Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of St Andrews. Her research specialisms include literary modernism, mid-twentieth-century literature, travel writing and war writing, and she has published work on these areas in edited volumes and journals including Modernist Cultures, Textual Practice and Twentieth-Century Literature. Her essay ‘Fantasias on National Themes: Fantasy, Space, and Imperialism in Rebecca West’ won the Andrew J. Kappel Prize in Literary Criticism (2020). Her monograph Travel, War and Home in Late Modernist British Literature is forthcoming in 2026.