Jennifer Linhart Wood: Sounding Otherness in Early Modern Drama and Travel. Uncanny Vibrations in the English Archive. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

In Sounding Otherness in Early Modern Drama and Travel: Uncanny Vibrations in the English Archive, Jennifer Linhart Wood marries an interest in the sounds of theatrical performance with a concern with the global soundscape and sensory experience. Primarily focused upon drama and its connection to travel literature, this impressively wide-ranging study offers both a fresh interpretation of well-trodden texts and vibrant readings of lesser-known works. Following a necessarily lengthy introduction that scopes out the historical and theoretical parameters of the book, it then divides its subject into three parts, each with an introduction and an interlude in between. Part one addresses ‘New World Symphony’, part two is on ‘Songs of the Orient’ and part three draws the concerns of these two parts together in ‘World Music: East is West’. There then follows a coda that considers the role of the lute as an uncanny instrument that gained widespread popularity in the West after it migrated from the East.