Eloquent Voices: Orality in the Age of Print, 1750-1850
A Symposium at the University of Sussex, 16th September 2025
Contributions are invited to a symposium on Orality in the Age of Print, 1750-1850, to be held at the University of Sussex, Brighton, UK, on Tues 16th September 2025. This event seeks to gather scholars working on the intersections between print and orality in this period, to review the state of the field and generate opportunities for further collaboration, including publications.
Orality, and its various modes and practices, played an important part in the literary, philosophical and cultural outputs of a period which has long been understood through the lens of print culture. Recent work has illuminated the complexities of print’s relations with speech and voice, demonstrating how the very conceptualisation of orality was made possible through incipient awareness of emergent print culture (Paula McDowell, The Invention of the Oral, 2017), and showing that print objects were frequently consumed in oral modes, such as acts of communal performance or reading aloud (Abigail Williams, The Social Life of Books, 2017). Spoken language, indeed, in various forms, presented a persistent point of preoccupation and investigation across this period. Conjectural histories linked orality to the formation of society itself, whether in the origin of language per se or in socially-foundational acts of oral story-telling. Yet concerns about potentially destabilising forms of emotive speech (Hume on superstition and enthusiasm, Rousseau on theatricality) also persisted. Whilst the formal teaching of traditional rhetoric declined, there was a marked uptake of interest in orality in the cultural domain, whether in theorising spoken language as a communicatory tool for commercial society and its newly mobile classes (Adam Smith, Hugh Blair); in elocution teaching and ‘schools of eloquence’; or in flourishing debating societies. Classical oratorical figures, including Cicero and Demosthenes, remained influential if contested models, as new ways were sought to enact the civic belonging and political critique long associated with the oratorical. Spoken language practices remained dominant in political, legal and religious institutions of public life, including in sermon and prayer practices, even whilst debates raged over correct forms of the latter. Finally, aesthetic theory articulated the emotive power (pathos, the sublime) of rhetorical voice, and the enthusiastic effusions and spoken rhapsodies associated with sentimentality and sensibility were both valorised and satirised.
What difference does it make to approach print literature in this period in the light of such contexts, and how might they inform our understanding of textual objects? This symposium invites contributions which explore how print culture negotiated, harnessed, exploited, expressed or regulated the powers of voice and their potentially wayward affects, in various and manifold ways, including in relation to such acts and notions as politeness, conversation, sincere speech, persuasion, and ethical eloquence. Contributions focusing on fiction, its techniques and devices, are especially welcome, but papers might also address other forms of writing, including sermons, debates, prayer, lectures, and philosophical writing.
Short papers of c20 minutes are welcome on any of the following or related areas:
- The role of voice in novels: dialogue, conversation, spoken soliloquy
- Fictional orators and acts of persuasion
- Private and/or domestic acts of eloquence or oratory
- The role of oral story telling in eighteenth-century philosophy
- Rhetoric and oratory, including oratorical strategies in printed texts
- Ventriloquism and other arts of voice
- Devotional voice in prayer
- Elocution and the education of voice; debating societies; public lectures; political oratory
- Enthusiasm and religious speech, including sermons
- Teaching of rhetoric and eloquence in universities
- Connections with aesthetic theory, the sublime
- Oral reading practices
- Oral genres in print eg the sermon
- Visual representations of oral practices
- Philosophical accounts of spoken language in language theory
Our Keynote speaker will be Professor Mary Fairclough (York)
Abstracts of 250-300 words, and any inquiries, should be sent to Professor Catherine Packham, Department of English Literature at University of Sussex, by 30 April 2025: