Speaking Volumes

An interdisciplinary study of women and language in England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Speaking Volumes focuses on the connections that contemporaries made between speech and reading. It studies the period's discourses on 'woman's language' and contrasts them with the linguistic practices of individual women. The book also argues that the oral performance of literature was important in fostering domesticity and serving as a means for women to practise authoritative speech. Utilizing a range of evidence gleaned from language texts, schoolbooks, diaries, letters, conduct books, and works of literature (notably the novels of Jane Austen), the author shows how eighteenth-century English women strategically used the stereotype of 'woman's language' while insisting implicitly that gender was not always the most salient feature of their identities.

Why do we speak the way we do, and what do our voices tell others about us? What is the truth behind the myths that surround how we speak? Jane Setter explores these and other fascinating questions in an accessible and engaging account that will appeal to anyone interested in how we use our voices in daily life.

From a lineup of acclaimed literary talents, wide-ranging works centering on books and bibliophilia. Writing about writing itself and about the books that are home to the written word. A library of ideas about language and the book in all their forms, Speaking Volumes collects poetry, fiction, and narrative nonfiction on historic, forbidden, repurposed, mistranslated, imaginary, lost, and life-changing books—books of every ilk.

An eclectic mix of short stories and poetry from a range of genres. This anthology is a collaborative work by writers who share a passion for what they are doing, rise to new challenges with a smile and who want to raise money for charities.

In a poem written in exile, Ovid pictures his latest book in conversation with his previous volumes, united in the bookcase containing his collected works back in Rome. One can imagine their dialogue - in the protected space of the whispering bookcase - as loaded with allusion and intertextuality. This collection of essays by the classicist Alessandro Barchiesi examines Ovid and his 'rationalistic art of illusion' along with intertextuality in Latin literature more generally, and in the wider context of the Graeco-Roman tradition. The book provides perspectives on the literary self-consciousness of the Latin poets, the allusive density of their texts, and the conflict between poetry and power in the Augustan age. The conflict between classicists and the texts they comment on, argue over and theorise about is also examined. Among the recurring topics in this book are the impact of intertextuality on the form of epic and epistle, the strategic significance of allusive poetics in a political context, and the importance of reading and interpretation as poetic themes.

In this text Edith Newman Devlin remembers her childhood in Dublin in the 1930s and 40s as a poor Protestant living among even poorer Catholics. Reading was her escape, and commentaries on the emotional truth of literature alternate with chapters of personal memoir.

One woman proves that painfully shy children can become successful, even when raised by an emotionally unstable mother. In The Silent Speak Volumes, a mother responds to her grown child's question: "Why don't we know more about your childhood, Mom?" This sweet yet painfully honest memoir examines one woman's formative years, in which her mother's words and actions were not always rooted in loving guidance. Despite her resulting low self-esteem and crippling shyness, the author is able to overcome the emotional manipulation of her past in order to find success and happiness. Her memoir was written for her children, but it's a story that will resonate with everyone.