Lecturing Women in British Fiction, Periodicals and Public Orality, 1870–1910: The First Speech

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Anne-Julia Zwierlein

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

The First Speech

Anne-Julia Zwierlein

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English

Routledge
31 March 2025

Performance art; Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 ; Communication studies; European history; Media studies

Series: The Nineteenth Century Series

This book examines the emergence of women as audiences and speakers on the British metropolitan lecture circuit and in mass print representations from 1870 to 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, this 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, this 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.

By: Anne-Julia Zwierlein
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 156mm,
Weight: 710g
ISBN: 9781032895192
ISBN 10: 1032895195
Series: The Nineteenth Century Series
Pages: 280
Publication Date: 31 March 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Primary , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Anne-Julia Zwierlein is Professor of English Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Regensburg, Germany, specialising in Early Modern and Victorian Studies. She has published work on Milton, early modern city comedy, literature and science, literature and imperialism, the novel of formation and Victorian oral cultures.