At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the literary lecture arrived on Londons cultural scene as an influential critical medium and popular social event. It flourished for two decades in the hands of the periods most prominent lecturers Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Thelwall, Thomas Campbell, and William Hazlitt. Lecturers aimed to shape auditors reading habits, burnish their own professional profiles, and establish a literary canon. Auditors wielded their own considerable influence, since their sustained approbation was necessary to a lecturers success, and independent series could collapse midway if attendance waned. Two chapters are therefore devoted to the auditors, whose creative responses to what they heard often constituted cultural works in their own right. Auditors wrote poems and letters about lecture performances, acted as patrons to lecturers, and hosted dinners and conversation parties that followed these events. Prominent auditors included John Keats, Mary Russell Mitford, Henry Crabb Robinson, Catherine Maria Fanshawe, and Lady Charlotte Bury. The Romantic public literary lecture is a fascinating cultural phenomenon in its own right, but understanding the medium has significant implications for some of the periods most important literary criticism, such as Coleridges readings of Shakespeare and Hazlitts Lectures on the English Poets (1818). The books two main aims are to chart the emergence of the literary lecture as a popular medium and to develop a...

Binding: Hardcover;254 pages; Publisher: Oxford University Press; Classification: DSBF; Weight: 592 g; Dimensions: 224 x 148 x 18

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