This chapter begins with a brief chronological outline of how vibrations figure in scientific and literary texts from the eighteenth-century to twentieth-century Modernism. It outlines approaches to the transmission of scientific and spiritualist concepts of vibratory energies and atoms through literature, going on to consider literary form and materiality as vibratory, focusing briefly on Conrad’s work. Moving further beyond the confines of literary periods, it then relates analysis of literature in its material forms to the work of music and sound studies scholars who are interested in the materiality of sound as vibration, focusing initially on contemporary bass music, and how it can affect its audience palpably and without linguistic signification. This latter area of research provides pointers for how literary approaches might engage with the materiality of texts and of reading/listening experiences, and, further, with an expanded sense of sound as a form of vibration that extends into the ‘infrasensory’ and operates both within and beyond discourse. The chapter goes on to use Dickens’s fiction to bring together approaches to textual, phenomenological and ontological vibrations. In its sonorous materiality, Dickens’s fiction records an experience of railway vibrations for its readers, while it also conveys a sense of their existence as borderline infrasound and of vibrations that escape perception and discourse.

Where do we start when thinking about literature in transition? This chapter uses the volume’s start date, 1700, as the basis for interrogating both the ideas of ‘literature in transition’ and ‘early modern’. Taking Edmund Spenser’s ruminations on change and permanence in the ‘Mutabilitie Cantos’ as its own point of departure, the chapter shows how the paradigm of transition is illuminated by writing in Irish, Latin, and English produced in the century or so preceding 1700. If political turmoil, linguistic contestation, and ethnic strife are the drivers of narrative and self-articulation, of literary resilience, innovation, consolidation, and decline, then the crucible of early modern Ireland has an arresting claim to the concept of transition. Writing in a period of irreversible change generates genealogical firsts – precursors of what is to follow – but also genres specific to their own time. The chapter probes the relationship of literature with transition: as representing change, as its written record, as the document of response to a new world taking shape, or of self-assertion in that world. Finally, it considers questions of perspective, arguing that scholarship is immersed in its own moment and that this directs us to the determining role of the end point in identifying beginnings.