Open Book Publishers

"This is a rich and engaging work of outstanding scholarship. Scholars in sociolinguistics, literature, and folklore will recognize the importance of the book for their fields. General readers will find it just plain interesting."

Quoting is all around us. But do we really know what it means? How do people actually quote today, and how did our present systems come about? This book brings together a down-to-earth account of contemporary quoting with an examination of the comparative and historical background that lies behind it and the characteristic way that quoting links past and present, the far and the near.

Drawing from anthropology, cultural history, folklore, cultural studies, sociolinguistics, literary studies and the ethnography of speaking, Ruth Finnegan’s fascinating study sets our present conventions into cross-cultural and historical perspective. She traces the curious history of quotation marks, examines the long tradition of quotation collections with their remarkable recycling across the centuries, and explores the uses of quotation in literary, visual and oral traditions. The book tracks the changing definitions and control of quoting over the millennia and in doing so throws new light on ideas such as 'imitation', 'allusion', 'authorship', 'originality' and 'plagiarism'.

Preface

I. SETTING THE PRESENT SCENE
1. Prelude: a dip in quoting’s ocean
2. Tastes of the present: the here and now of quoting
3. Putting others’ words on stage: arts and ambiguities of today’s quoting

II. BEYOND THE HERE AND NOW
4. Quotation marks present, past, and future
5. Harvesting others’ words: the long tradition of quotation collections
6. Quotation in sight and sound
7. Arts and rites of quoting
8. Controlling quotation: the regulation of others’ words and voices

III. DISTANCE AND PRESENCE
9. What is quotation and why do we do it?

Appendix 1: Quoting the academics
Appendix 2. List of the Mass Observation writers

References

Ruth Finnegan is Visiting Research Professor and Emeritus Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Open University where, as a founder member of the academic staff, she has spent much of her academic career. With a first degree in classical languages and literatures (Oxford’s Literae Humaniores) she moved into anthropology as a graduate and spent several years conducting fieldwork and teaching in Africa. Her publications have consistently been inspired by these overlapping literary, historical and anthropological backgrounds. Her particular interests are in the anthropology/sociology of artistic activity, communication, and performance; debates relating to literacy, 'orality' and multimodality; and amateur and other 'hidden' activities. She has published widely on aspects of communication and expression, especially oral performance, literacy, and music-making. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1996 and an Honorary Fellow of Somerville College Oxford in 1997; and was awarded an OBE for services to Social Sciences in 2000.

Publications, rooted in cultural anthropology but also drawing on a range of disciplinary traditions, include: Limba Stories and Story-Telling 1967, 1981; Oral Literature in Africa 1970; Modes of Thought (joint ed.), 1973; Oral Poetry, 1977 (2nd edn 1992); Information Technology: Social Issues (joint ed.), 1987; Literacy and Orality: Studies in the Technology of Communication,1988; The Hidden Musicians: Music-Making in an English Town 1989 (2nd edn 2007); Oral Traditions and the Verbal Arts 1992; South Pacific Oral Traditions (joint ed.),1995; Tales of the City: A Study of Narrative and Urban Life, 1998; Communicating: The Multiple Modes of Human Interconnection, 2002; Participating in the Knowledge Society: Researchers Beyond the University Walls (ed.), 2005; and The Oral and Beyond: Doing Things with Words in Africa, 2007.

Quotation, with its bedfellows imitation and allusion, is at least as old as written civilisation. Through ever-increasing distances from the present and the personal, this book from the innovative Open Book Publishers (it can be read online for free) works through the thicket surrounding the verbal and grammatical mechanics of quoting. It has enlightening things to say about the Western tradition of compiling books of quotations. [...] Finnegan offers analyses of proverbs, storytelling and the rich intricacy that signals spoken quotation that do much to illuminate the complexity of oral communication. The verbal realisation of quotation is the core concern of the volume, which crosses academic and cultural disciplines with effectiveness and confidence.