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. She is the author of "The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace 1678-1730" and "Elinor James: Printed Writings".
Reviews
"'The Invention of the Oral' is distinctly original, challenging long-accepted claims, further refining recent refinements, and burrowing into new, relevant, and sometimes oddly overlooked categories. McDowell is a superb archivist and a skilled interpreter of both detail and trend" – Cynthia Wall, author of "The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century"
"By focusing on how the idea of the oral was the product of a major media shift – not unlike the one we find ourselves in the midst of now with print and the digital – McDowell has given us a new critical framework with which to understand the eighteenth-century invention of the idea of modernity itself" – Helen Deutsch, author of "Loving Dr. Johnson"
"In this rigorously researched and boldly conceived study, McDowell pursues the origins of the idea of 'oral culture' from canonical figures such as Swift, Defoe, and Johnson to ballad collectors, elocutionists, and Billingsgate fishwives. Everyone interested in the history of mediation in the eighteenth century will want to read this book" – Tom Mole, author of "Byron's Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy"
"McDowell's smart insistence that the voice and its gestural embodiments be placed in contrast to the long triumphant march of letters gives us pause to consider where we are now. For, as McDowell intimates, if we are to understand the move from the medium of print to the textualizations of the electronic age, we would do well to examine an earlier era in which the affordances of new technologies – both print and orality – were examined with care" – Peter de Bolla, author of "The Architecture of Concepts: The Historical Formation of Human Rights"
