The Art of Eloquence Byron, Dickens, Tennyson, Joyce

by Bevis, Matthew

• ISBN13: 9780199253999
• ISBN10: 0199253994
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-09-27
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

'In the course of these fifty years we have become a nation of public speakers. Everyone speaks now. We are now more than ever a debating, that is, a Parliamentary people' (The Times, 1873). The Art of Eloquence considers how Byron, Dickens, Tennyson, and Joyce responded to this 'Parliamentary people', and examines the ways in which they and their publics conceived the relations between political speech and literary endeavour. Drawing on a wide range of sources - classical rhetoric, Hansard, newspaper reports, elocutionary manuals, treatises on crowd theory - this book argues that oratorical procedures and languages were formative influences on literary culture from Romanticism to Modernism. Matthew Bevis focuses attention on how the four writers negotiated contending political demands in and through their work, and on how they sought to cultivate forms of literary detachment that could gain critical purchase on political arguments. Providing a close reading of the relations betweenprinted words and public voices as well as a broader engagement with debates about the socio-political inflections of the aesthetic realm, this is a major study of how styles of writing can explore and embody forms of responsible political conduct.

Author Biography

Matthew Bevis is lecturer in English Literature at the University of York

Table of Contents

Abbreviations	p. viii
Introduction: Literary Persuasions	p. 1
Disinterested Parties	p. 1
Debating Societies	p. 15
Byron's Hearing	p. 29
Question, Question	p. 29
Forms of Address	p. 39
The Eloquence of Action	p. 49
Poetic Justice	p. 59
On Second Thoughts	p. 74
An Audience with Dickens	p. 86
Addressing the Times	p. 86
Plotting Talk	p. 100
Honourable Gentlemen	p. 111
Bringing the House Down	p. 130
Tennyson and Sound Judgement	p. 145
Measured Language	p. 145
Testing Voices	p. 157
A Civil Tongue	p. 172
The Tone of Empire	p. 188
Joyce's Breathing Space	p. 204
Governing the Tongue	p. 204
Crowd Trouble	p. 214
Stephen's Heroes	p. 227
House Rules	p. 242
Coda: An Eyed Ear	p. 263
Bibliography	p. 270
Index	p. 293
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