Lecturing Females: Oral Performances, Gender and Sensationalism in Metropolitan Lecturing Institutions and Mass Print Culture, 1860-1910
Final Report Abstract
The project examined emerging patterns of female visibility and vocality within the late-Victorian and Edwardian mediascape in Britain (1860-1910) by focusing on the cross-traffic between various sites and media: the metropolitan Literary and Scientific Institution, the popular and feminist periodical, New Woman and suffrage writing, and manuals of rhetoric and elocution. Inquiring into the complex feedback loops between mass print and oral cultures, the project considered both print and lecture platforms as increasingly politicised rallying places for an upwardly mobile (female) lower-middle to middle-class segment of the urban population. Shaped by its guiding question about the dimensions and precariousness of women’s public agency between 1860 and 1910 and researching archival ‘traces’ and fictional representations of female “lecturers” and “lectured” (Belgravia, 1886), the project readdressed 19th-century negotiatons between elite and popular cultures, and between the mediated realities of a mass print environment and the period’s persistent stagings of celebrity, authority, and presence. By elucidating shared modes of representation across the range of texts examined, the project also developed models for reevaluating New Woman and suffrage writing, whose sensational and programmatic narratives can be read as remediations of the late- Victorian and Edwardian mediascapes. A more comprehensive view of project outcomes is offered on the project website, https://www.uni-regensburg.de/sprache-literatur-kultur/anglistik/dfg-projekt/index.html
Publications
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Lecturing Women in Victorian Periodicals Database (LWVP). In: Datenbank-Infosystem (DBIS)
Anne-Julia Zwierlein, Heidi Weig, Sebastian Graef
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The Roar on the Other Side of Silence: Sound, Hearing, and Embodiment in Victorian Literature, in: Literature and the Senses, ed. Annette Kern- Stähler and Elizabeth Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming)
Zwierlein, Anne-Julia
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Viktorianische Zeitschriften als Plattformen: Multimedial, polyvokal, außerparlamentarisch, in: Einführung in die Zeitschriftenforschung / Introduction to Magazine Studies, Edition Medienwissenschaft, ed. Sabina Fazli and Oliver Scheiding (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, forthcoming)
Zwierlein, Anne-Julia
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The Lecturer as Revenant(e): Sensation and Conversion in Late- Victorian Popular Lecturing and Mass Print, in: The Popular and the Past: Popular Cultures of the Nineteenth Century, ed. Doris Feldmann and Christian Krug, special issue of Journal for the Study of British Cultures 23.1 (2016): 41-56
Zwierlein, Anne-Julia
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The Spectacle of Speech: Victorian Popular Lectures and Mass Print Culture, in: The Making of English Popular Culture, ed. John Storey; Directions in Cultural History (London: Routledge, 2016) 165-83
Zwierlein, Anne-Julia
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Amateur Theatricals and the Dramatic Marketplace: Lacy's and French's Acting Editions of Plays, in: Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film (2017)
Weig, Heide-Marie
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Cultures of Lecturing in the Long Nineteenth Century, vol. 1: Practices of Oral Performance in Manuals of Rhetoric, Journalism and Autobiography; vol. 2: Women and Public Speech in Manuals of Rhetoric, Journalism, Autobiography and Fiction (Heidelberg: Winter, 2022) (ISBN vol. 1: 978-3-8253-4934-9; ISBN vol. 2: 978-3-8253-4935-6)
Anne-Julia Zwierlein, Heidi Weig, Sebastian Graef
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Metropolitan Communities: Periodicity and Participation in Late 19th-Century Popular Lecturing and Penny Fiction Weeklies, in: Periodicals in Focus: Methodological Approaches and Theoretical Frameworks, ed. Jutta Ernst, Dagmar von Hoff, and Oliver Scheiding, Studies in Periodical Cultures, vol. 1 (Leiden/Boston: Brill, (forthcoming)
Zwierlein, Anne-Julia
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‘She lectured and attended lectures’: Transmedia Practices and Female Vocality in Late-Nineteenth-Century Cultures of Public Lecturing and Mass Print, in: Transmedia Practices in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Christina Meyer and Monika Pietrzak-Franger (London: Routledge, forthcoming)
Zwierlein, Anne-Julia
