The Speaking Muse

The Speaking Muse challenges the dominant narrative of the print’s monopoly in German media studies, examining how oral reading practices such as literary declamation flourished alongside silent reading practices.

How did German readers experience the German literary canon in the 18th and 19th centuries – through silent reading or by ear? The Speaking Muse: Literary Declamation in Germany, 1750–1900 traces the impact of a forgotten culture of literary orality in the German-speaking world, from its early flourishing in the late 18th century to its popularization in the Wilhelmine era. In the wake of the “reading revolution” of the 18th century, oral reading practices proliferated alongside silent ones and became a central element in what Abigail Williams has called the “social life of books” for a diverse range of audiences and participants.

Mary Helen Dupree shows how the culture of literary declamation, from recitation anthologies to declamatory concerts that combined music and spoken word, afforded new opportunities for interacting with literature for a variety of audiences, including women and marginalized “others,” while fostering innovations in publication, pedagogy, and performance.

Working at the intersection of literary history, performance studies, sound studies, and print history, The Speaking Muse shows that the cultures of declamation and print in the 18th- and 19th-century German-speaking world were not strictly exclusionary, but were intertwined.

Author Biography

Mary Helen Dupree is Associate Professor of German at Georgetown University, USA. She is the author of The Mask and the Quill: Actress-Writers in Germany from Enlightenment to Romanticism (2011) and co-editor (with Sean B. Franzel) of the volume Performing Knowledge 1750-1850 (2015).