On the Use and Abuse of "Orality" for Art: Reflections on Romantic and Late Twentieth-Century Poiesis

Abstract

It is not an overstatement to say that, in the last decades of the eighteenth and the first decades of the nineteenth centuries, almost every major British literary poet found him- or herself engaging with oral tradition, as well as with the figure of the oral poet, his work, his cultural position, and his method of composition. Oral tradition acquired new status not only as a legitimate fund of cultural authority but also a resource for the making and annotating of “original, ” literary poetry.1 The image of the oral poet, moreover, fired the Romantic imagination—whether this poet was imagined as Ossian, “the last of his race, ” purported bard of third-century Scottish warriors,2 or as a seventeenth-century “last minstrel ” singing his dying 1 On the changing and disputed cultural status of oral tradition[s] in British literary culture, see in particular Trumpener 1997. With respect to Scotland in particular, and its simultaneous idealization and degradation of “the oral, ” see Fielding 1996. 2 On the controversy attending the Ossian poems, published by James Macpherson throughout the 1760s, there is an ever-growing bibliography. To examine

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.