Transforming Orality: Articulating Social Change in Nineteenth-Century Britain

In bringing together a group of international experts on Victorian oral culture, this collection examines formats of public orality in the long nineteenth century from a cultural-historical perspective, treating the evolving scene of oral culture as a symptom and catalyst of social, political, and media change. The volume asks how nineteenth-century oral performances, alongside literary and journalistic mediations and representations of orality, ‘articulated’ social change by highlighting the multiplicity and increasingly complex intermediality of oral formats, as well as their own generic and mediatic malleability. The collection argues that the changing formats of oral speech can be seen as performative modes of presentation that were further differentiated by (shifting and intersectional) categories of identity, such as race, gender, and class. Across the various perspectives with which the individual essays approach orality, the volume, in emphasising the forms and formats of orality, firmly insists that represented speech is never merely ‘content’, but also performed ‘form’, with its own inherent performative politics.