The Romantic Literary Lecture in Britain by Sarah Zimmerman
2020; Modern Humanities Research Association; Volume: 115; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/mlr.2020.0065
ISSN2222-4319
Autores Tópico(s)Theater, Performance, and Music History
ResumoMLR, ., e Romantic Literary Lecture in Britain. By S Z. Oxford: Oxford University Press. . xxiii+ pp. £. ISBN ––––. As a historical speaking performance, the Romantic literary lecture can only be reconstructed provisionally, even where fully prepared scripts are available. A lecture is fundamentally oral, structured to fill a certain time-span, and delivered in a specific room; it is a live interaction with auditors whose social status, gender, and education help shape the content and delivery style; the lecturer’s intonation and physical gestures can inflect his words with meanings not traceable in print. Interrogating the ontology of the object of study is, therefore, of central concern for Sarah Zimmerman and it determines her methodology. Literary Romanticists looking for close readings of extant lecture scripts will find both less and more than they might expect. In the chapters on extemporaneous speakers Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John elwall, for example, Zimmerman (understandably) reaches the content of her selected lectures only in concluding paragraphs. But there is a fascinating immersive element to this study. Drawing on anecdotes, letters, journals, and advertisements , Zimmerman constructs a rich texture of ‘lecture culture’. Describing architectural features and evoking institution-specific atmospheres, Zimmerman invites her readers to enter imaginatively the space of the lecture theatre. Consequently , her analysis of the content, purpose, and reception of literary lectures between and will appeal to cultural historians, theatre historians, and scholars of performance studies as well as literary critics. e Romantic Literary Lecture in Britain is implicitly in two sections. Chapters to feature the lectures of Coleridge, elwall, omas Campbell, and William Hazlitt, while Chapters and explore the roles and responses of auditors. A recurrent theme throughout the first section is the struggle in the lecture room between temporality and permanence. For Coleridge, this struggle is evident both in his attempt to present his lectures as durable criticism rather than passing entertainment , and in his aim to help auditors cultivate taste based on permanent principles of poetry. Zimmerman presents Coleridge’s reading of Hamlet, which privileges acting over thinking, as his means of demonstrating that lecture performances can be generative of permanence. Her tantalizingly short discussion of Coleridge’s lecture on Romeo and Juliet reaffirms this argument by upholding the permanence of Romeo’s ‘momentaneous’ love (pp. –). Chapter introduces elwall in opposition to Wordsworth: while Wordsworth elevates rural retreat and interiority, for elwall the ‘language really spoken by men’ requires auditors (pp. –). is is perhaps an oversimplification of the oral and conversational elements of Wordsworth’s poetic project, yet it highlights elwall ’s practicalism and the importance of spoken language to his reform agenda. Much of the following chapter is biographical: Campbell’s education brought about social mobility while in turn he expanded educational opportunities in Britain. Yet Zimmerman returns here to the tension between temporal and permanent value by explaining that Campbell was maligned by Coleridge and Hazlitt for courting fashionable (yet fleeting) opinion, both as poet and as lecturer. Reviews Chapter , on Hazlitt’s Lectures on the English Poets (), contains the most complex sustained argument of the book. Zimmerman explores the elegiac tone of Hazlitt’s work (he looks back in order to move forward, politically and poetically) and shows that writing, for Hazlitt, is superior to speaking because the speaker appeals to the present audience rather than to posterity. As Zimmerman’s analysis of Hazlitt’s prose style shows, however, his written lectures have the intimacy and immediacy of spoken language. Keats’s engagement with Hazlitt’s lectures is the starting point for Chapter . Zimmerman’s ambitious claim that attending lectures shaped Keats’s poetic representation of listening yields one of the most exciting, pioneering elements of this study. Analysis of the sonnet ‘O thou whose face hath felt the Winter’s wind’ (the only example of poetic close reading in the book (pp. –)) is beautifully sensitive and throws unusual light on ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and ‘e Fall of Hyperion’. While women were not permitted to lecture—and while Coleridge and Hazlitt established a canon that excluded female writers—women were not absent from ‘lecture culture’. e Romantic Literary Lecture concludes by showing that networks of patronage and conversation maintained by female...
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