Lecturing the Atlantic

• Main Author: Wright, Tom F.
• Format: Book
• Language: unknown
• Published: Oxford University Press 2017
• Subjects: North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190496791.001.0001

Lecturing the Atlantic argues for a new interpretation of the public lecture, as one of the nineteenth-century Anglo-American world’s most important cultural forms. It reorients our understanding of lecturing during the “lyceum movement” by seeing it as an international and cross-media phenomenon patterned by cultural investment in an “Anglo-American commons.” series of case studies shows how some of the midcentury 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. Through a series of readings of Anglo-American relations as understood through performance and print re-mediation, Wright connects the transatlantic turn in cultural studies to important recent debates in media theory and scholarship on the public sphere and nineteenth-century public culture.