Cultures of Lecturing in the Long Nineteenth Century / Volume 1: Practices of Oral Performance in Manuals of Rhetoric, Journalism and Autobiography. Ed. Anne-Julia Zwierlein, Heidi Weigand Sebastian Graef (Regensburg Studies in Gender and Culture, 10). Heidelberg: Winter, 2022.
Cultures of Lecturing in the Long Nineteenth Century / Volume 2: Women and Public Speech in Manuals of Rhetoric, Journalism, Autobiography and Fiction. Ed. Anne-Julia Zwierlein, Sebastian Graef and Heidi Weig (Regensburg Studies in Gender and Culture, 11). Heidelberg: Winter, 2022.

• Julia Kuehn

This two-volume anthology brings together over 150 texts about practices of lecturing, recitations and other forms of public speaking during the Victorian and Edwardian periods. The extracts reveal both the importance and omnipresence of oration across numerous spheres of nineteenth-century life – education, politics, religion, entertainment – and across a broad social spectrum, including (grammar) school and university students, the professional middle class but also, increasingly, the working class and women. The anthology presents a variety of textual genres, including the (oration) manual, advice literature, autobiography, the novel, newspaper articles, serialised short fiction, satire, advertisements and political speeches. The first volume reprints excerpts that address the generalities as well as the social, material and logistical conditions associated with practices of oral performance. In the former cluster, subheadings include “The Art of Public Speaking,” “Speaking Techniques and Voice Production,” and a group of texts on gesturing, posture and general demeanour. Subsections highlighting the “Audience” and the moderation of lectures (“Chairmanship” – the masculine form is intentional here) are followed by texts that discuss the “managing” of lectures and lecture tours. Finally, excerpts that address specific, prevalent modalities of nineteenth-century oral performance – public readings/recitals, and penny readings – form two further focal clusters, while “Humorous or Satirical Approaches” to lecturing close the first volume.