The Invention of the Oral : Print Commerce and Fugitive Voices in Eighteenth-Century Britain / Paula McDowell.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

McDowell, Paula, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Oral tradition--England.

Oral tradition.

Oral communication--England.

Oral communication.

Printing--England--History--18th century.

Printing.

English literature--18th century--History and criticism.

English literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (368 pages)

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, [2017]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Just as today's embrace of the digital has sparked interest in the history of print culture, so in eighteenth-century Britain the dramatic proliferation of print gave rise to urgent efforts to historicize different media forms and to understand their unique powers. And so it was, Paula McDowell argues, that our modern concepts of oral culture and print culture began to crystallize, and authors and intellectuals drew on older theological notion of oral tradition to forge the modern secular notion of oral tradition that we know today. Drawing on an impressive array of sources including travel narratives, elocution manuals, theological writings, ballad collections, and legal records, McDowell re-creates a world in which everyone from fishwives to philosophers, clergymen to street hucksters, competed for space and audiences in taverns, marketplaces, and the street. She argues that the earliest positive efforts to theorize "oral tradition," and to depict popular oral culture as a culture (rather than a lack of culture), were prompted less by any protodemocratic impulse than by a profound discomfort with new cultures of reading, writing, and even speaking shaped by print. Challenging traditional models of oral versus literate societies and key assumptions about culture's ties to the spoken and the written word, this landmark study reorients critical conversations across eighteenth-century studies, media and communications studies, the history of the book, and beyond.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Oral Tradition in the History of Mediation

2. Oral Tradition as A Tale of a Tub: Jonathan Swift's Oratorial Machines

3. The Contagion of the Oral in A Journal of the Plague Year

4. Oratory Transactions: John "Orator" Henley and His Critics

5. How to Speak Well in Public: The Elocution Movement Begins in Earnest

6. "Fair Rhet'ric" and the Fishwives of Billingsgate

7. "The Art of Printing Was Fatal": The Idea of Oral Tradition in Ballad Discourse

8. Conjecturing Oral Societies: Global to Gaelic

Coda: When Did "Orality" Become a "Culture"?

Notes

Index

Notes:

Previously issued in print: 2017.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 22. Okt 2019)

ISBN:

9780226457017

OCLC:

988326284