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The art of speech : elocution, speech training, speech therapy and the performative limits of class in mid-twentieth-century Britain
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Burchell, Andrew (2024) The art of speech : elocution, speech training, speech therapy and the performative limits of class in mid-twentieth-century Britain. Modern British History . ISSN 2976-7016. (In Press)
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Abstract
This article argues that elocution, speech training and speech therapy -- three professions concerned with the voice -- were intimately bound up with a shifting politics of class in early- and mid-twentieth-century Britain. The last two, in particular, attempted to stake new claims in the changed landscape of the post-1945 welfare state. Proponents of speech training distinguished themselves from elocutionists and saw their role to improve children’s speech, but they performatively disavowed class as an organising category within it. This was paralleled by speech therapy, which emerged as a formal profession in Britain in 1945 through the unification of two separate (and often rival) halves of the profession under a single regulatory college, and which found itself having to justify where its pathologising of vocal production ended and elocution’s focus on the aesthetics of accent began. This essay argues that these disavowals provide a useful framework through which to read class dynamics and consider the performative dimensions of class identities at this time. Considering select writers and speech experts -- who straddled the boundaries of elocution, speech training and speech therapy -- this article shows how a variety of different categories, from gender to geography, were employed as proxies to allow for the problematization of dialect but not accent and to efface ‘class’.
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||
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Divisions: | Faculty of Arts > History | ||||||
Journal or Publication Title: | Modern British History | ||||||
Publisher: | Oxford University Press | ||||||
ISSN: | 2976-7016 | ||||||
Official Date: | 2024 | ||||||
Dates: |
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Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||
Publication Status: | In Press | ||||||
Re-use Statement: | This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced version of an article accepted for publication in Modern British History following peer review. The version of record [insert complete citation information here] is available online at: xxxxxxx [insert URL and DOI of the article on the OUP website]. | ||||||
Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access | ||||||
Date of first compliant deposit: | 12 April 2024 | ||||||
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