
Edited by Prof. David Duff (Queen Mary University of London) and Prof. Marc Porée (Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris), this special issue assesses the literary significance of the mobilization of orality and public utterance in the period 1789-1830, exploring links between the speech acts of politicians, polemicists and educators and the writings of poets and other authors. How is the Romantic revaluation of the ode which produced the famous lyrics of Keats, Shelley, Hugo and Hölderlin – and the powerful odes of less canonical figures such as John Thelwall, Robert Merry and Mary Robinson – connected with the revival of ceremonial ode-writing and public ritual? How are the speech genres of everyday life integrated into the more complex genres of imaginative literature? Can speech-writing, sermonizing or toast-making be themselves a form of literary activity? What happens when legally, morally binding oaths and commitments are broken, forcing the swearer to recant, in public again – are such disavowals part of the culture of apostasy and disenchantment posited by literary historians of Romanticism? And to what extent do these purposive deployments of public speech enter the literary and rhetorical theory of the period?
All essays are available in open access through the journal website.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
David Duff and Marc Porée – Introduction
Francesco Buscemi – How to Do Things with Oaths: Militancy and Loyalty in the French Revolution
Rémy Duthille – Toasting, Oratory and Parody in Britain during the French Revolution
Judith Thompson – La voix de la girouette: The French Connections of John Thelwall’s Elocutionary Theory
Pierre Lurbe – “The spouting rant of high-toned exclamation”: The Art of Oral/Aural Caricature in Paine’s Rights Of Man
Robert W. Jones – “An alarming state of affairs”: Rhetoric, Resistance and the Nation in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s Speech of 20 April 1798
Dafydd Moore – “Religion’s firm-rooted truths”: Richard Polwhele, Pulpit Oratory and Loyalist Romanticism in the English Province
Catherine Bois – Poetic/Rhetorical Ethos and the Performative Power of Words in the “French” Books of The Prelude
David Duff – Blake’s Public Addresses
Paul Hamilton – “Inspiration’s darling child”: The Romantic Ode