Professor Sarah Zimmerman Explores the Romantic Public Lecture on Literature

In the early nineteenth-century, hundreds of people in London – from the middle and upper classes – would collect in lecture rooms and theaters to hear popular literary authorities engage in spirited debates about literature.  This lecture series was a hot ticket.  Lecturers and auditors alike wanted to see and be seen in this burgeoning scene, but they also wanted to indulge in a provocative public and collective criticism.  

Professor Sarah Zimmerman's new book, The Romantic Literary Lecture in Britain, explores this scene.

Zimmerman’s book delves into the public literary lectures in London's early nineteenth-century cultural scene, a setting for vibrant socialization among lecturers and auditors as well as the site for rich literary criticism.  It considers the reciprocal roles that popular lecturers and auditors had in the cultivation of this cultural scene.  Lecturers sought to advance their profiles and mold the minds of the auditors by authorizing a literary canon.  Auditors responded to lectures through not only organization and attendance, but conversations with others, the composition of their own poems and letters, and patronage.

The Romantic Literary Lecture in Britain is the first book-length study of the Romantic public literary lecture in Britain.  It explores not only the works of prominent lecturers of the time – Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Thelwall, Thomas Campbell, and William Hazlitt – but also the role that women author-auditors – including Mary Russell Mitford, Catherine Maria Fanshawe, and Lady Charlotte Bury – had in shaping the scene. 

Congratulation to Professor Sarah Zimmerman on this achievement!