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Author McDowell, Paula, author.

Title The invention of the oral : print commerce and fugitive voices in eighteenth- century Britain / Paula McDowell.

Publication Info. Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2017.

Item Status

Description 1 online resource
Physical Medium polychrome
Description text file
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index.
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.
Local Note eBooks on EBSCOhost EBSCO eBook Subscription Academic Collection - North America
Subject Oral tradition -- England.
Oral tradition.
England.
Oral communication -- England.
Oral communication.
Printing -- England -- History -- 18th century.
Printing.
Chronological Term 18th century
Subject English literature -- 18th century -- History and criticism.
English literature.
History.
LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES -- Speech.
Chronological Term 1700-1799
Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc.
History.
Other Form: Print version: McDowell, Paula. Invention of the oral. Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2017 9780226456966 (DLC) 2016033842 (OCoLC)954134202
ISBN 9780226457017 (electronic book)
022645701X (electronic book)
9780226456966
022645696X
Standard No. 40027280551