Voices from Beyond: Physiology, Sentience, and the Uncanny in Eighteenth-Century French Literature by Scott M. Sanders
Voices from Beyond focuses on the voice as it was constructed in French works, influenced by French vocal sciences as well as British literary and philosophical texts. It considers the writing of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Denis Diderot, Francois Baculard dArnaud, and Jacques Cazotte in particular, and explores how their texts theorize, represent, and construct three interrelated vocal types: the sentimental, the vitalist, and the uncanny. These authors represented the human voice as an intersectional organ with implications for ones emotional disposition, physical health, cultural identity, gender, and sexuality. Sanders argues that while the conception of sentimental and vitalist voices was anchored to a physiological understanding of vocal organs, this paradoxically led to the development of a disembodied, uncanny voiceone that could imitate the sounds of a good moral fiber while masking a monstrous physiology.