Skip to content
Home/ Romantic Literary Lecture in Britain
Romantic Literary Lecture in Britain

Romantic Literary Lecture in Britain

by Zimmerman, Sarah
No customer reviews yet ISBN 9780198833147 Oxford University Press

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.

About the author

Product details

BrandOxford University Press
Pub dateMar 24, 2019
ISBN-100198833148
ISBN-139780198833147
LanguageEnglish
Dimensions8.75 × 5.75 × 0.75 in
Weight1 lb
Last updated 2026-04-24 23:42
$126.49
In stock — ships in 24 hours with free tracking
Delivery by Monday, September 14, 2026
Qty
Sign in to Add to Saved list
Free delivery on orders over $35.
15-day returns. Any reason.
Secure checkout. We never store card details.

Readers who bought this also bought

More from Modern - 19th Century
See all
Oxford Handbook of Decadence
The meaning of <em>decadence</em> varies with context, depending on what (or who) is understood to have declined, decayed, or degenerated. These negative meanings are familiar from history (the decline and fall of Rome), sociology (the decay of communities), morality (the degeneration of values), and more, including such popular conceptions of decadence as excess and corruption. At the same time, all of this negative decadence has found positive cultural expression, principally in literature, through the work of such celebrated nineteenth-century decadents as Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, and many others. This volume takes the study of decadence beyond these canonical literary works to explore the phenomenon in broader historical, geographical, and cultural contexts. <p/>In thirty-five chapters by esteemed scholars from a range of disciplines, the <em>Oxford Handbook of Decadence</em> addresses different critical periods, such as classical antiquity, various ages of empire, the interwar era in the twentieth century, and contemporary times, as well as key places--France, Belgium, Britain, Italy, Germany, the Nordic nations, Russia and Ukraine, the Ottoman Empire, and Japan--and such genres as the novel, the short story, drama, the essay, prose poetry, and film. The volume also considers decadence more broadly as a culture not limited to literature by tracing its manifestations in such material forms as book design, fashion, interior decoration, and architecture, as well as through the experiential register of the senses: decadent vision, sound, smell, taste, and touch are all reflected, respectively, in painting, music, perfume, cuisine, and feeling. Finally, the chapters explore the theoretical resonance of decadence in such fields as theology, science, ecology, politics, psychoanalysis, and philosophy. By illuminating the various ways decadence can be construed, the Handbook offers an in-depth and original exploration into the paradox of decadence: a culture that draws its creative energy from the idea of decline.
$247.19
Moral Economies of American Authorship: Reputation, Scandal, and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Mar
Ryan, Susan M
$47.48
Common Precedents: The Presentness of the Past in Victorian Law and Fiction
Ben-Yishai, Ayelet
$44.18
Lecturing the Atlantic: Speech, Print, and an Anglo-American Commons 1830-1870
Wright, Tom F
$142.95
Untimely Democracy: The Politics of Progress After Slavery
Laski, Gregory
$142.95
Nervous Stage: Nineteenth-Century Neuroscience and the Birth of Modern Theatre (UK) (UK)
Smith, Matthew Wilson
$82.60