Description
Expanding our understanding of what it meant to be a nineteenth-century author, Amanda Adams takes up the concept of performative, embodied authorship in relationship to the transatlantic lecture tour. Adams argues that these tours were a central aspect of nineteenth-century authorship, at a time when authors were becoming celebrities and celebrities were international. Spanning the years from 1834 to 1904, Adams’s book examines the British lecture tours of American authors such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Mark Twain, and the American lecture tours of British writers that include Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, and Matthew Arnold. Adams concludes her study with a discussion of Henry James, whose American lecture tour took place after a decades-long absence. In highlighting the wide range of authors who participated in this phenomenon, Adams makes a case for the lecture tour as a microcosm for nineteenth-century authorship in all its contradictions and complexity.
Table of Contents
Introduction The Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Lecture Tour and the Case of Frederick Douglass; Chapter 1 Seen and Not Heard: The Transatlantic Tours of Harriet Martineau and Harriet Beecher Stowe; Chapter 2 Performing Ownership: Dickens, Twain, and Copyright on the Transatlantic Stage; Chapter 3 Apostles in the Flesh: Arnold, Wilde, and the Reproduction of Personality in America; Chapter 4 The Voice of the Master: Henry James and the Paradox of Performance; conclusion Performing Authorship beyond the Nineteenth Century;
