Abstract
Identifying the “literary” lecture as a bridge between oratory and print, I argue for the platform’s centrality to the nineteenth-century literary marketplace. American lecture bureaus like the Redpath Lyceum Bureau employed an intricate system of print and oratory to create a market for lectures that both responded to and challenged notions of authorship at the fin de siècle. Authors such as Kate Field, Mark Twain, and James Whitcomb Riley used and were used by the platform to promote works in progress and works in print by offering readings, dramatic interpretations, critical commentaries, and personal reminiscences about writers and writing. By studying the promotional materials of the Redpath Lyceum Bureau, I demonstrate the lecture’s importance in defining literary activity and authorial celebrity during this period. Attending to the lecture and its wide influence, I argue further, allows us to examine orality’s unstable position in a then developing intellectual hierarchy.
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©2015 by De Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Victorian Oral Cultures: Introduction
- Peepshows for All: Performing Words and the Travelling Showman
- The Schooled Voice: Sound and Sense in the Victorian Schoolroom
- The Author on Stage: The Redpath Lyceum Bureau and the Promotion of the “Literary” Lecture
- “The Subject Escapes Me”: Spellbinding Lecturers and (In-)Attentive Audiences in Late-Victorian Serialized Sensation Fiction
- My Fair Lady Automaton
- “Highly Superior ‘Variety Turns’”: The Orthodox Roots of Suffrage Theatre
- Book Reviews
- The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies
- Die Auswirkungen der Globalisierung auf den modernen Fremdsprachenunterricht. Globale Herausforderungen als Lernziele und Inhalte des fortgeschrittenen Englischunterrichts. Are We Facing the Future?
- The Fiction of America. Performance and the Cultural Imaginary in Literature and Film
- The Literary Life of Things: Case Studies in American Fiction
- Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture
- Propaganda 1776: Secrets, Leaks, and Revolutionary Communications in Early America
- Books Received
- Books Received
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Victorian Oral Cultures: Introduction
- Peepshows for All: Performing Words and the Travelling Showman
- The Schooled Voice: Sound and Sense in the Victorian Schoolroom
- The Author on Stage: The Redpath Lyceum Bureau and the Promotion of the “Literary” Lecture
- “The Subject Escapes Me”: Spellbinding Lecturers and (In-)Attentive Audiences in Late-Victorian Serialized Sensation Fiction
- My Fair Lady Automaton
- “Highly Superior ‘Variety Turns’”: The Orthodox Roots of Suffrage Theatre
- Book Reviews
- The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies
- Die Auswirkungen der Globalisierung auf den modernen Fremdsprachenunterricht. Globale Herausforderungen als Lernziele und Inhalte des fortgeschrittenen Englischunterrichts. Are We Facing the Future?
- The Fiction of America. Performance and the Cultural Imaginary in Literature and Film
- The Literary Life of Things: Case Studies in American Fiction
- Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture
- Propaganda 1776: Secrets, Leaks, and Revolutionary Communications in Early America
- Books Received
- Books Received