Lecturing Females: Oral Performances, Gender and Sensationalism in Metropolitan Lecturing Institutions and Mass Print Culture, 1860-1910

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Anne-Julia Zwierlein
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2015 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 274541459

This project examines 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 metropolitan Literary and Scientific Institutions and the medium of popular and feminist periodicals, with a special emphasis on the place of women in 19th-century cultures of rhetoric and elocution. Inquiring into the complex feedback loops between mass print and oral cultures, the project considers both print and lecture platforms as politicised rallying places for an upwardly mobile (increasingly female) lower-middle to middle-class segment of the urban population. Assessing the dimensions and precariousness of 19th-century female public agency, the project readdresses 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. Investigating the material circuits of communication between fictional and non-fictional texts, oral performances (lectures, elocution lessons, recitations) and the institutional settings of ‘rational entertainment’, the project researches archival ‘traces’ and representations of the bodies and voices of female “lecturers” and “lectured” (Belgravia, 1886). It also develops new models for reading New Woman and suffragist writings in terms of their deliberately staged sensationalism and remediation of the late-Victorian and Edwardian mediascape. While narratives of increasing female agency came to be questioned in the context of a pre-Modernist scepticism about ‘presence’ and immediacy in a technologised world, women’s systematic and collective (self-)education in public speaking is among the under-researched explanations of “how the vote was won” (Cicely Hamilton).

• DFG Programme: Research Grants