
The Romantic Literary Lecture in Britain
Sarah Zimmerman(Author)
Oxford University Press
Published on 31. January 2019
Book
Hardback
254 pages
978-0-19-883314-7 (ISBN)
Description
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the literary lecture arrived on London's cultural scene as an influential critical medium and popular social event. It flourished for two decades in the hands of the period's most prominent lecturers: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Thelwall, Thomas Campbell, and William Hazlitt. Lecturers aimed to shape auditors' reading habits, burnish their own professional profiles, and establish a literary canon. Auditors wielded their own considerable influence, since their sustained approbation was necessary to a lecturer's success, and independent series could collapse midway if attendance waned. Two chapters are therefore devoted to the auditors, whose creative responses to what they heard often constituted cultural works in their own right. Auditors wrote poems and letters about lecture performances, acted as patrons to lecturers, and hosted dinners and conversation parties that followed these events. Prominent auditors included John Keats, Mary Russell Mitford, Henry Crabb Robinson, Catherine Maria Fanshawe, and Lady Charlotte Bury. The Romantic public literary lecture is a fascinating cultural phenomenon in its own right, but understanding the medium has significant implications for some of the period's most important literary criticism, such as Coleridge's readings of Shakespeare and Hazlitt's Lectures on the English Poets (1818). The book's two main aims are to chart the emergence of the literary lecture as a popular medium and to develop a critical approach to these events by drawing on an interdisciplinary discussion about how to treat historical speaking performances.
Reviews / Votes
Sarah Zimmerman's The Romantic Literary Lecture in Britain ... offer[s] a compelling view of Romantic literary culture as a series of sociable, communal, and performative events [that] will likely change the way readers encounter written Romantic works. * John Savarese, European Romantic Review *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Oxford
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
12 Illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 222 mm
Width: 145 mm
Thickness: 17 mm
Weight
455 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-19-883314-7 (9780198833147)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

Sarah Zimmerman
The Romantic Literary Lecture in Britain
E-Book
01/2019
1st Edition
OUP eBook
€56.99
Available for download

Sarah Zimmerman
The Romantic Literary Lecture in Britain
E-Book
01/2019
1st Edition
OUP eBook
€56.99
Available for download
Person
Sarah Zimmerman is Professor of English at Fordham University.
Content
Preface
1: Approaching the Lecture Room
2: Coleridge the Lecturer, a Disappearing Act
3: John Thelwall's School of Eloquence
4: Thomas Campbell, Scholar-Poet
5: Acting Like an Author: Hazlitt's Lectures on the English Poets
6: The Thrush in the Theater: Keats at the Surrey Institution
7: The Last Word: Women in the Lecture Room
1: Approaching the Lecture Room
2: Coleridge the Lecturer, a Disappearing Act
3: John Thelwall's School of Eloquence
4: Thomas Campbell, Scholar-Poet
5: Acting Like an Author: Hazlitt's Lectures on the English Poets
6: The Thrush in the Theater: Keats at the Surrey Institution
7: The Last Word: Women in the Lecture Room