On speech, print, and new media : Thomas Nashe and Marshall McLuhan

What I want to focus on here, however, is not the subject of the TLS article, which was a boxed set of twenty pamphlets from various points in McLuhan's career, but the subject of his Cambridge Ph.D. thesis, the Elizabethan writer Thomas Nashe. Since Cambridge University Library will not lend out the thesis in any form, and also imposes a strict embargo on quotation from it, this work has understandably not featured much in discussions of McLuhan and his subsequent intellectual development,1 but it does raise some very interesting questions both for early modernists and historians of the media. Why Nashe? What continuity is there between Nashe and the themes of McLuhan's later work? How might this early investigation of late sixteenth-century cultural conditions point us towards McLuhan's future role as the founding father of media studies?Issue title: Sound Effects