The Discourse of Oratory: The New Rhetoric and Romantic Writing is a study of the cultural anxieties about the power of public speaking that pervaded the mid eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries. Its argument is that those anxieties formed a discursive center for two of the most important forces in the history of British letters and literary studies -- Romanticism and the New Rhetoric -- and that those forces engaged it primarily through a shared concern with the rise of religious evangelism.