The invention of the oral : print commerce and fugitive voices in eighteenth- century Britain / Paula McDowell.
| Author/creator |
McDowell, Paula author. |
| Format | Electronic and Book |
| Publication Info | Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. |
| Description | 1 online resource |
| Supplemental Content | ProQuest Ebook Central |
| Subject(s) |
Click here for more information about this title
| Contents | 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. |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| Source of description | Print version record. |
| Issued in other form | Print version: McDowell, Paula. Invention of the oral. Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2017 9780226456966 |
| Genre/form | Criticism, interpretation, etc. |
| Genre/form | History. |
| ISBN | 9780226457017 (electronic bk.) |
| ISBN | 022645701X (electronic bk.) |
| Standard identifier# | 40027280551 |
Available Items
| Library | Location | Call Number | Status | Item Actions | |
| Electronic Resources | Access Content Online | ✔ Available |