Lecturing the Atlantic: Speech, Print, and an Anglo-American Commons 1830-1870 [Hardcover]

Lecturing the Atlanticis a reinterpretation of the public lecture as one of the most important cultural forms of the nineteenth century Anglo-American world. Wright shows how key figures including Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William Makepeace Thackeray used the lecture hall to explore Anglo-American relations and themes of progress and national identity.In the early nineteenth century, the public lecture emerged as one of the Anglo-American world's most important cultural forms. On both sides of the Atlantic, audiences and performers transformed a cultural practice with origins in the medieval cloister into an unexpected flashpoint medium of public life. In the United States, as part of the lyceum movement, lecturing became crucial to literary and political life, multiple social reform movements, and the rise of public intellectualism, offering speakers from across the cultural spectrum a platform from which to promote their ideas and explain contemporary life.Lecturing the Atlanticargues for a new interpretation of this neglected institution. It reorients our understanding of the lyceum by seeing it as an international and cross-media phenomenon patterned by cultural investment in an Anglo-American commons. Tom F. Wright shows how some of the mid-century North Atlantic world's most enduring cultural figures, such as Frederick Douglass, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, as well as fascinating marginal voices such as Lola Montez and John B. Gough, used lecture hall discussions of a transatlantic imaginary to offer powerful commentaries on slavery, progress, comedy, order, tradition, and reform. Crucially, this world was a matter as much of print as performance, since as the book reveals, a remarkable culture of newspaper commentary allowed oratory to resonate far beyond the realm of the lecture hall.Through a series of inventive readings of Anglo-American relations as understood through performance and prinly