The Author on Stage: The Redpath Lyceum Bureau and the Promotion of the “Literary” Lecture

Abstract

Abstract Identifying the “literary” lecture as a bridge between oratory and print, I argue for the platform’s centrality to the nineteenth-century literary marketplace. American lecture bureaus like the Redpath Lyceum Bureau employed an intricate system of print and oratory to create a market for lectures that both responded to and challenged notions of authorship at the fin de siècle. Authors such as Kate Field, Mark Twain, and James Whitcomb Riley used and were used by the platform to promote works in progress and works in print by offering readings, dramatic interpretations, critical commentaries, and personal reminiscences about writers and writing. By studying the promotional materials of the Redpath Lyceum Bureau, I demonstrate the lecture’s importance in defining literary activity and authorial celebrity during this period. Attending to the lecture and its wide influence, I argue further, allows us to examine orality’s unstable position in a then developing intellectual hierarchy.