Book Review| August 01 2020 Review: Lecturing the Atlantic: Speech, Print, and an Anglo-American Commons, 1830–1870, by Tom F. Wright Tom F. Wright. Lecturing the Atlantic: Speech, Print, and an Anglo-American Commons, 1830–1870. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017, xi + 245 pp. ISBN 9780190496791 Granville Ganter Granville Ganter St. John's University, Queens, New York Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (3): 323–325. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.3.323 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Granville Ganter; Review: Lecturing the Atlantic: Speech, Print, and an Anglo-American Commons, 1830–1870, by Tom F. Wright. Rhetorica 1 August 2020; 38 (3): 323–325. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.3.323 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2020The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Reviews 323 a Griffin, da Genette a Benveniste) mostrano inoltre come, nel suo lavoro, C. si sia orientato con estrema competenza tra i diversi teorici del linguaggio. In sintesi, ci troviamo di fronte a un lavoro che riesce a mostrare in modo molto equilibrato, per usare le parole dell'autore, "la densita epistemologica della nozione, antica e moderna, di eufemismo e la molteplicita di angolazioni a partire dalle quali, nel mondo greco, si potevano elaborare linguisticamente i tabu del sesso, della morte e della sfortuna in generale". Il risultato del volume di Menico Caroli e il riconoscimento del carattere non solo necessario ma anche inevitabile di uno strumento del linguag­ gio come l'eufemismo, che era in grado (e lo e ancora) di regolamentare la convivenza civile, anche se questo poteva avere, a volte, come risultato l'inevitabile conseguenza di modificare, anestetizzandola, la realta dei fatti. Simone Beta Dipartimento di Filologia e critica delle letterature antiche e moderne Universita di Siena Via Roma 56 1-53100 Siena beta@unisi.it Tom F. Wright. Lecturing the Atlantic: Speech, Print, and an AngloAmerican Commons, 1830-1870. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017, xi + 245 pp. ISBN 9780190496791 This revisionary account of the transatlantic dimensions of American lyceum culture is a central contribution to the ongoing understanding of early American public speech. Its distinctive thesis reorients the notion, propagated in many claims about the American-ness of the lyceum from its nineteenth-century proponents into late twentieth-century scholarship, that the lyceum was a uniquely American institution. Wright grants that the lyceum certainly had a nationalist face, but not exclusively so—early American lecture culture is enriched by an appreciation of its transatlantic aspects, or what Wright calls an expressive "commons." Wright argues that, in fact, what many nineteenth-century audiences perceived as a contest between British forms and American ones was really a matrix for the devel­ opment of an international mode of educational expression. Wright's book is the most recent of a linked series of re-examinations of the role of speech in early American culture. Starting with Garry Wills' Lincoln at Gettysburg (1992), Jay Fleigelman's Declaring Independence (1993), and Gregory Clark and S. Michael Halloran s Oratorical Culture in NineteenthCentury America (1993), continuing through the work of Sandra Gustafson's Eloquence is Power (2000), Angela Ray's The Lyceum and Public Culture (2005), Carolyn Eastman's, A Nation of Speechifiers, (2009), and Elizabeth Dillon s 324 RHETORICA New World Drama (2014), there has been a large cohort of theoretically informed scholars studying the interplay of oral and written forms of expres­ sion in the early republic. Early approaches tended to follow the lines of Walter Ong's distinctions between orality and literacy, exploring the unique aspects of oral literary traditions. Since the work of Sandra Gustafson, how­ ever, many scholars have come to emphasize the interaction, of orally delivered and printed modes of expression. For example, the public lecture was heard on site but later summarized and quoted for reading audiences by newspapers. And, as Tom Wright notes throughout his book, lyceum speakers constantly recalibrated their performances with other media in mind, attempting to thwart easy summary by newspapers (in Emerson's case) or to exploit ensuing print coverage (such as Frederick Douglass) or to control negative press propa­ ganda (such as Thackeray). Wright's careful attention to the audience recep­ tion of popular lecturing throughout this text is an implicit nod toward the past two decades of scholarship that readers new to this material might miss, and which is prominently featured in the work of Ronald and Mary Zboray. Professor Wright has been an important figure in advancing this conver­ sation, both theoretically and institutionally. Wright organized a 2011 confer­ ence at the American Antiquarian Society from which he edited a collection of essays, The Cosmopolitan Lyceum (2013), that sought to put American lecture culture in a more global context. The stakes of this project were best described by Angela Ray's essay, which skeptically asked her peers how they were changing the idea that the lyceum was essentially an American project of "nation-building," the cultural work of unifying the country. Wright was also the...