Oral culture is a topic, not a body of literature for, paradoxically, as soon as someone transcribes oral culture it becomes literature and disappears in its original form. The search for this culture in England from the late seventeenth to the late eighteenth centuries involves close study of new or evolving genres: the character, the fable, and other prose forms like the confessional narrative and the miraculous. Contemporary transformations of Aesop and Theophrastus will be key, but I will focus first on authors close to oral consciousness like Bunyan and Defoe (Grace Abounding and Journal of a Plague Year). The mid eighteenth-century interest in primitive culture, especially of the Celtic lands, is another topic of focus, including Gray, Collins, Smart, and the explosion of popular ballad-like verse like evangelical hymns. Finally, I will turn to artisan-literature for a search of how closely the self-taught (e.g., Burns, Blake, Yearsley) recall the oral culture that once surrounded them.