Telepoetics

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.

• IllustrationsAcknowledgementsNotes on ContributorsIntroduction: Phone BooksSarah Jackson, Philip Leonard and Annabel WilliamsPart I. Connections and Disconnections1. ‘Rinse and Wring the Ear’: Reflections on Being in Long-Distance ConversationAnthony V. Capildeo2. Genres of the Telephone, 1876–1913Richard Menke3. Callbacks: Death and the Telephone in Modern DramaKevin Riordan4. ‘Long | Distance Calls’: The Telephone as Lyric Device in Jack Spicer and W. S. GrahamSam Buchan-Watts Part II. Desire, Intimacy and Affect5. The Siren Call: Gender, Telephony and Desire in Elizabeth Bowen’s To the North (1932)Imogen Free 6. ‘Supernatural Paraphernalia’: Ford Madox Ford’s Uncanny TelepoeticsMax Saunders7. (H)allophonies: Cixous, Derrida and Others on the LineLaurent MilesiPart III. Sound and Voice8. Voicing Class and Status in Mid-Century FictionLara Ehrenfried9. ‘The board’s asunder’: Switchboards, Operators and Phoneys in Mid-Century FictionAnnabel Williams 10. Samuel Beckett’s Intertextual Telephony: Gender on the LineJivitesh Vashisht11. ‘the telephone is overloaded’: Receiving a Feminist TelepoeticsNatalie FerrisPart IV. Intelligence, Surveillance and Power12. Looking for a Listener: Twentieth-Century Lyric TelephonyTyne Daile Sumner 13. Muriel Spark’s Scrambled Telephony: Precarious Lines and Affective DisconnectionsBeatriz Lopez14. The Telephone in Pain: Impossible Confessions in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The SympathizerSarah JacksonPart V. Subjectivities, Mobilities and the Networked Self15. Sleep Mode: Phones, Achievement-Subjects, and the Sleep Crisis in Contemporary LiteratureDiletta De Cristofaro16. On Answering the Phone in The Stanley Parable: The Telephone-in-the-videogame, Identity and PlaySouvik Mukherjee17. Cell PhonePhilip LeonardBibliographyIndex