Place, Writing, and Voice in Oral History by Shelley Trower (review)

The writings in Shelly Trower’s collection, Place, Writing, and Voice in Oral History, present variations on the theme of place and locality, brilliantly organized to reference, amend, overlap, and expand upon one another, in what amounts to an immensely helpful reference book for the interdisciplinary-minded oral historian. Here, we see the field formally engaged with other disciplines: specifically, as oral history relates to, differs from, complements, and promises to enhance studies in locality, writing, literature, oral tradition, geography, performance, and the environment.

The first section looks at the “translation of local oral traditions and languages into print” and the impact of that practice on how a place is understood locally and globally throughout history, as well as place and its specific relationship to oral tradition, literature, and print technologies (83). The second section turns its attention to actual interviews about different locales, investigating how first-person voices differ from literary summaries of a place, as well as how oral history can bring understanding to the environmental issues at stake in a given location. The final section continues to investigate oral history’s relationship to locality, while also naming the oral history interview as a location itself in a chapter on an oral history project of performance art in Wales, which present and future audiences can “visit” as staged performances or in the archive. Lastly, we turn to real and virtual oral history trails, Toby Butler’s Memoryscapes project about the cultural landscape of the River Thames and Steven High’s Millscape, a multimedia website that takes the closed mills of Sturgeon Falls, Canada, as its subject.

For oral historians interested in the relationship between oral history and literature, Trower’s volume is an excellent, original resource, with much ground-breaking theoretical exploration to offer. The first chapter traces the regional romanticization of the UK’s West Country to the work of Eliza Bray, whose collections of folk stories about the area in the 1800s converted “oral testimony and oral tradition into marketed text” and still figures heavily into the cultural imaginary of Dartmoor as a place ridden with ghosts and pixies—“a containable sublime where we can meet the ghosts of our own yearnings before driving back to the village for a B & B and a cream tea” (25, 26). Tim Fulford outlines here the danger in Bray’s practice of “making oral tradition conform to poetic justice and conventional morality” or the tendency of some literature to romanticize, reduce, and refabricate place into something digestible for mass consumption (35).

Shelley Trower takes up this tendency in her chapter on the China clay country in Cornwall, which compares literature of that region to oral stories. Her observation that “writers tend to describe the landscape of the clay country in terms of its strangeness and foreignness,” whereas interviewees who lived and worked in the clay industry had a more dynamic, intimate relationship with their environs and, therein, a more nuanced perspective, is more than just a comment on how class distinctions form perspective on a place (89). The comparison leads us to a generative, exciting new point of entry into the field, showing how “listening to oral history interviews with people who themselves work with and experience the landscape on a daily basis, rather than just reading visual, written descriptions, provides another way of moving beyond the idea of landscape as a view from a distance” (96).

A persistent theme in these explorations of place and oral history is romanticization and nostalgia, which Paul Thompson’s essay takes up deftly. Unlike Trower and Fulford, both of whom examine and critique literary romanticization of place, Thompson’s “Wivenhoe Landscapes Remembered” warmly looks at instances of romanticization in oral histories; here, of an abandoned, post-industrial North Essex village. From the mouths of interviewees, nostalgia takes on a literary quality, “celebrating,” as they do, “a place now lost or changed beyond recognition” and offering a “touch of the sublime” (108, 125).

We return...