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The Victorian Pulpit: Spoken And Written Sermons In Nineteenth-Century Britain, Robert Ellison

English Faculty Research

The Victorian Pulpit is the first book to study the nineteenth-century British sermon from the perspective of orality-literacy theory (the branch of literary and rhetorical inquiry concerned with the differences between spoken and written language). Building on the groundbreaking work of Milman Parry in the 1920s Albert B. Lord and Eric A. Havelock in the 1960s and 1970s, and especially Walter J. Ong in the 1970s and 1980s, orality-literacy studies had become an active, wide-ranging discipline by the 1990s, the time the book was conceived and written.

The first part of this study of the sermon as "oral literature" focuses …