Invention of the Oral - Print Commerce and Fugitive Voices in Eighteenth-Century Britain

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.

About the author

Paula McDowell is associate professor of English at New York University.

Product details

• Authors: Paula McDowell, Professor Paula Mcdowell
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 30.06.2017
• EAN: 9780226456966
• ISBN: 978-0-226-45696-6
• No. of pages: 368
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > English linguistics / literary studies; BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Industries / Media & Communications, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / General, 18th century, c 1700 to c 1799, United Kingdom, Great Britain, Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800, Literary studies: c 1600 to c 1800, C 1700 To C 1800, Publishing industry & book trade, Publishing and book trade