Orality and Literacy in Transatlantic Perspective

Abstract

This article considers Walter Ong’s contribution on the thirtieth anniversary of Orality and Literacy and revises some of his conclusions about the role of rhetoric in literary culture. It then considers the transatlantic rise of political oratory as an influential genre and analyses its representation in Anthony Trollope’s Phineas Finn (1869) and Henry Adams’s Democracy (1880).