Lecturing Women in British Fiction, Periodicals, and Public Orality, 1870-1910

Anne-Julia Zwierlein

Lecturing Women in British Fiction, Periodicals, and Public Orality, 1870-1910
Format
Hardback
Publisher
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Country
United Kingdom
Published
1 May 2025
Pages
308
ISBN
9781032895192

Lecturing Women in British Fiction, Periodicals, and Public Orality, 1870-1910

Anne-Julia Zwierlein

This book examines the emergence of women as audiences and speakers on the British metropolitan lecture circuit and in mass print representations from 1870-1910. Bringing together research on Victorian lecturing, periodicals, voice studies, and the cultural history of feminism, it sheds new light on the interdependence of orality and print and the rise of the British women's movement.

Sifting through the archives of lecture institutions (the Birkbeck Literary and Scientific Institution, the London Institution, and the Royal Institution), penny fiction weeklies and feminist weeklies, New Woman and suffrage novels, autobiographical writings and rhetorical manuals, the book reconstructs the changing mediascape of late Victorian London and treats speech events, in print and on site, as catalysts for democratic participation. Undertaking an archaeology of women's presence in the lecture hall, it explores conservative fantasies in fiction of the female speaking automaton alongside new writings that transformed women orators from objects of sensation into public agents. By analysing women's collective self-education in rhetoric and elocution, the book traces the emergence in political fictions of key narrative tropes of oral performance: the surprise encounter in the lecture hall, the moment of conversion during a lecture, and the symbolic 'first speech' of new suffrage recruits.

Drawing on new and extensive primary research, this book intervenes in several flourishing fields of inquiry: literary studies, oral culture studies, sound and voice studies, performance studies, periodical studies, and Victorian and Edwardian cultural history.

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