The Cosmopolitan Lyceum: Lecture Culture and the Globe in Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract

Tom F. Wright's ambition in editing The Cosmopolitan Lyceum is twofold. First, he seeks to advance and bring into dialogue two big interdisciplinary trends: the burgeoning scholarship on cosmopolitanism and the lyceum as an institution, and on the nineteenth-century public lecture as a cultural practice. In this goal Wright and his eleven authors succeed brilliantly. The book is full of new insight into old topics. In the diaries of female auditors Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray find resistance to the simplistic patriotism and paternalism of male speakers. Other essays explore the stage personas of literary celebrities such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, and William H. H. Murray, shedding new light on the complex interplay of oratory and print authorship. Other contributors examine the American thirst for international content and voices on the lecture podium as conveyed through, for example, Bayard Taylor's travelogues, George Robbins Glidden's “scientific” mummy unwrappings, and the work of the Maori performer Wherahiko Rawei.