James Mulholland’s Sounding Imperial is a study of eighteenth-century English poetry and its relationship with orality, particularly in the works of Thomas Gray, James Macpherson, and William Jones. “Orality” implies in this work techniques of oral narration as well as the creation of poetic works imitating oral texts. The subject is placed within the context of the British Empire and therefore also reflects on postcolonial theory. Mulholland brings to the fore the engagement with orality in the written poetry of eighteenth-century British poets who struggled with the impersonal nature of print, and with the presence and perception of oral narrators in the colonies of the British Empire. The study is an analysis of the use of orality as a literary device by English poets with reference to the aesthetics and politics of and around literary creations.
Mulholland discusses the work of Thomas Gray, particularly The Bard, with reference to the occupation of Wales and the legend that the English king had killed all the bards of Wales. Gray’s poetic work is a monologue by an imagined last bard. Mulholland analyzes the literary devices Gray employs to assume the role of the bard and speak on behalf of the Welsh populace. He does not stop at postcolonial critique, nor at his appreciation of the innovative ways in which Gray creates the atmosphere of orality, but goes on to complicate his analysis with discussion of several Welsh poets and their works inspired by Gray’s Bard and how they used it to create and support ideas of Welsh nationalism.
Mulholland follows this with a study of James Macpherson and his famous work Ossian and presents a rather comprehensive history of the making of this text and its reception. His analysis of Macpherson’s use of the techniques of orality is well substantiated with examples, which lets one see how the confusion of whether Ossian was a literary or an oral text emerged and became part of the reception of this work. If Mulholland had also taken into consideration the influence this work had across Europe and in the emergence of folklore studies, the analysis would have been highly enriched. This analysis includes a discussion of the influence of Ossian within Britain, particularly in Scotland and the important role it played in the emergence of Scottish cultural identity and nationalism.
The last poet discussed by Mulholland was a judge by profession during the establishment of the East India Company in India and is renowned as the founding father of Oriental studies. With this chapter Mulholland stretches the geographical boundaries of his subject and its analysis. He is correct in doing so, as the imaginary of India was already widespread in Europe by the late-eighteenth century. While Mulholland’s analysis here follows the same method as his analysis of Thomas Gray and James Macpherson, it is unable to dwell on the fact that, as a scholar of Sanskrit, Jones was dealing with orality in classical texts, and his Brahmin bard has a very different social and political status than the bards in Gray’s or Macpherson’s works. Mulholland also does not carry the analysis forward to see its influence on Indian literary writing or other forms of expression in culture.
James Mulholland’s analysis expresses discontent with the bi-polar method of Edward Said-dominated postcolonial theory, and presents a more complex picture than the black-and-white colonizer and colonized. He explores dimensions of English literature that connect it to the geographical margins of the English language and the British Empire. This exploration, however, remains largely textual, and while it refers to other realities it does not engage with them. This applies both to the text and the context. Engagement with and use of oral techniques are discussed, as is the politics of orality, but the question of whether these techniques of orality had anything to do with the real practice of orality in Wales, Scotland, and India remains unexplored. Had this field been explored, this book would have offered an inter-disciplinary analysis across the boundaries of folklore and literature.
Sounding Imperial is a very readable book. It will be mainly of interest to students and scholars of English literature and its history.
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[Review length: 690 words • Review posted on March 5, 2014]