Performing Authorship in the Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Lecture Tour

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 examines tours by British and American authors, including Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens, and Oscar Wilde, arguing that these tours were a central aspect of nineteenth-century authorship at a time when authors were becoming celebrities and celebrities were international.