It lends a sense of categorical correctness to someone or something’s belonging in a location. Pandemonium, then, denotes a place where demonic activities, or evil deeds, are most fitting. Mary Shelley’s more figurative use in Frankenstein (1818) captures a tension between an individual’s longing...

In nineteenth-century travel writing, pandemonium came to signify noisy and chaotic places often with racial and primitivizing connotations. Several of the Oxford English Dictionary’s modern usages elide the term with rhythm and percussion in African-diasporan or nonwestern music. A passage in Ma...

From its beginning, pandemonium classified beings in space along moral and civic lines. Its modern meaning points to ways in which noise has since been constructed to represent ‘immoral’ or ‘uncivilized’ elements in social hierarchies.

Source: The Source of Milton’s Pandemonium,...