The podium in print: the popular lecture in American literary culture, 1865-1914
Date
2014
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
The popular lecture and the industry that supported it played a vital role in postbellum authorship and American literary culture. The lecture platform often served as an agent for the promotion, dissemination, and critical evaluation of printed works, at once complementing and rivaling the publishing industry in its defining of authorial celebrity and literary forms. Supported by a print-based network of advertisements, transcriptions, and reviews, the lecture platform not only gave authors another forum for promoting their books, but it also gave readers more direct access to literary figures—a point of contact that provided readers with additional opportunities to influence the literary market. My project, The Podium in Print, examines the resulting shift in author-reader relations from the perspective of lecture bureaus, the popular press, and authors such as Edith Wharton, Henry James, and Mark Twain to determine to what extent contemporary debates about the social value of lecture culture—which often pitted oratory against print—were motivated by self interest. In short, I argue that these media were only at odds in the minds of those invested in creating, maintaining, or challenging intellectual hierarchies. ☐ Despite the prevalence of literary speakers and the broad range of literary topics on the circuit, literary scholars tend to overlook the platform’s centrality to nineteenth-century authorship and the literary marketplace. The popular lecture, when discussed by literary scholars, is generally considered a supplement to literary history, a vehicle through which to examine an individual author’s larger body of work or biography. With the exception of Mark Twain, whose platform career has generated fruitful discussion in many book-length studies, lectures by the likes of Louisa May Alcott, William Dean Howells, and Jack London are read as mere essays, collapsed into the author’s oeuvre, with their tours examined as historical events unto themselves. And while such readings are valuable, their focus on individual authors often highlights the author’s exceptionalism without considering the degree to which his or her experience was dictated by a vast commercial structure within (and against) which all postbellum authors had to operate. ☐ In the introductory chapter, “Nineteenth-Century Platform Culture and American Literary Studies,” I outline the major claims and parameters of this study, engaging with current scholarship on lecture culture, authorship, print culture, and media studies, while asserting the need for a closer attention to the interconnectedness of orality and print in the postbellum literary marketplace. Chapter two, “The Author on Stage: James Redpath and the Promotion of the ‘Literary’ Lecture,” describes the means by which the Redpath Lyceum Bureau created new opportunities for readers to connect with authors such as Mark Twain and Charles Dickens through dramatic readings, personal reminiscences, historical readings, or literary criticism. These platform performances, I argue, defined future readers’ expectations of literature and authorship. Travel writer and widely popular lecturer on the Adirondacks Rev. William H. H. Murray capitalized especially on the access afforded by the platform; my third chapter, “With Press and Paddle,” draws on Murray’s career to demonstrate the platform’s role in negotiating tensions between print and oratory, private study and lived experience. Chapters four and five examine literary representations of lecture culture and discuss the ways authors fought for literary dominance. In “Fixed in Print: The Legible Lecturer in Henry James’s The Bostonians,” I read James’s novel as a site for tracing concerns about the commercial platform, public exposure, and the fixity of print. My reading draws parallels between printed and oratorical space, positing that success on the platform necessarily results in an imprinting of that profession on both the speaker’s body and subsequent printed personas. In my final chapter, “‘Doing It for the Baby’: Edith Wharton and the Trouble with Women on the Platform,” I situate Wharton’s short stories “The Pelican” and the “Legend” in an ongoing conversation about the relative value of useful over abstract knowledge, in which the lecture was considered a lesser intellectual enterprise. ☐ A century after the supposed death of the lecture, we are still drawn to related educative forms. TED Talks, short for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, which strives to bring the most authoritative and dynamic speakers before the public, serves as a sort of modern lyceum, seeking to educate, inspire, and entertain its audience. Functioning much in the same way that nineteenth-century lectures did, the TED forum provides audience members opportunities to engage with speakers like Isabel Allende, Steve Jobs, and J. J. Abrams, thereby tapping into a rich tradition of public speaking and showmanship. Questions about the relative merits of oratory and print have expanded to include aural and visual media, and the formally print-based means of promotion and dissemination have been replaced with a multimodal interface. I conclude my dissertation by arguing that our twenty-first century ambivalence about competing media and lamentations for the death of the printed word reflect an intellectual struggle ongoing since the nineteenth century.
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Keywords
Authorship, Print, Orality