Abstract
How does historical fiction create a world for readers to inhabit? Drawing upon contemporary convergence theory that traces how stories move across concurrent media platforms, this essay enacts a multimodal approach to Bruce Holsinger’s historical novel The Invention of Fire across two mediums: the printed text and the audiobook. Holsinger’s mystery uses an increasingly blind poet John Gower as its sleuth-protagonist, and I consider how the text’s first-person narration and shifting rhetoric of blindness convey the sensory experience of a lost medieval past. The audiobook voice narration by Simon Vance further remediates the story’s tropes of oral performance, and a broader history of ‘talking books’ for blind readers reveals how sensory experience and embodied knowledge are constructed by technology and environment.
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