Oral tradition in the history of mediation -- Oral tradition as a tale of a tub: Jonathan Swift's oratorial machines -- The contagion of the oral in a Journal of the plague year -- Oratory transactions: John "Orator" Henley and his critics -- How to speak well in public: the elocution movement begins in earnest -- "Fair rhetoric" and the fishwives of Billingsgate -- "The art of printing was fatal": the idea of oral tradition in ballad discourse -- Conjecturing oral societies: global to Gaelic -- Coda: when did "orality" become a "culture"?
Summary:
Just as today's embrace of the digital has sparked interest in the history of print culture, the rise of commercial print culture in eighteenth-century Britain inspired reflection at the time on the traditions that had seemingly preceded it. And so it was, as Paula McDowell shows in this book, that what we know as oral culture was identified and soon celebrated during the very period of the British book trade's ascendancy. McDowell recreates a world in which everyone from clergymen to fishwives, philosophers to street hucksters, competed for space and audiences in taverns, marketplaces, and the street. Their encounters forged new conceptions of the oral, as McDowell demonstrates through an impressive array of sources, including travel narratives, elocution manuals, theological writings, ballad collections, and legal records. 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.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.