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

Synopsis

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?