The Irish Literary Revival at the turn of the twentieth century was heavily invested in the value of orature, characteristically associated with peasant culture as the living remnant of pre-modern society, which is typically seen as being on the verge of its final disappearance. Focusing on Augusta Gregory and W. B. Yeats, this essay resituates the relationship between orature and modernity in Irish culture in the context of technology, noting that the Revival coincides exactly with the period – from the late 1880s to the early 1920s – that saw the emergence of key technologies of sound: the telephone, the gramophone/phonograph, and later radio. A key concept here is the idea of over-lapping histories of technology; running alongside histories of technological innovation, political economy, and social change is a hidden history of technologies of sound as the ghost of oral culture, imbricated in some of the same literary narratives that memorialise the pre-modern.

This chapter examines the oratorical tradition of the soapbox speech in Ellison's fiction and describes the similarities between prominent New York orators of the early twentieth century and aspects of the protagonist of Invisible Man.

The parallel and intersecting relationships among the written and oral literatures, folklore, musics, performative arts, and orature of the Anglophone Caribbean have been well documented, giving rise to a large body of critical work in literary and cultural studies by scholars such as Mervyn Morris, Kamau Brathwaite, Gordon Rohlehr, and Funso Ayejina. Sustained treatments such as Carolyn Cooper’s Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender and the “Vulgar” Body of Jamaican Popular Culture (1993), Kwame Dawes’ Natural Mysticism: Towards a New Reggae Aesthetic in Caribbean Writing (1999), and special issues of academic journals illustrate the growing acknowledgement of these oral–scribal intersections. With a steady growth from the 1920s onward, these cross-genre, cross-media fertilizations reached a high point in the 1970s with the rise and globalization of new forms/expressions of urban music, against the background of major local, regional, and global shifts such as the escalation of nationalist contentions; the Black Power movement; and in Jamaica, the ‘official’ recognition of Rastafari, and the emergence of new dub poetry and other newer genres. The consolidation and recognition of the synergies between orature and literature have in turn fashioned a substantial body of theorizations and scholarly contemplations out of which have emerged terms such as oraliterature, novelylspo, reggae aesthetic, among others.