TY - BOOK ID - 56972476 TI - The invention of the oral PY - 2017 SN - 9780226456966 022645696X 9780226457017 022645701X PB - Chicago London DB - UniCat KW - Book history KW - History of the United Kingdom and Ireland KW - anno 1700-1799 KW - Buchdruck. KW - Buchhandel. KW - Englisch. KW - English literature KW - English literature. KW - Literatur. KW - Mündliche Literatur. KW - Mündliche Überlieferung. KW - Oral communication KW - Oral communication. KW - Oral tradition KW - Oral tradition. KW - Printing KW - Printing. KW - Schriftlichkeit. KW - History and criticism KW - History KW - 1700-1799. KW - England. KW - Gro�britannien. KW - History and criticism. UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:56972476 AB - 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. ER -