Scholars of the American lyceum movement have tended to view it as an American story. The new system of traveling lecturers and celebrity speakers who fanned out across the landscape starting about mid-century brought a new shared experience to their dispersed audiences, alleviating the sense of cultural isolation and helping to spread mass culture. In all, scholars have insisted, the lyceum helped to foster an increased sense of local and national community; it played a key role in transforming these United States into the United States.
But the ten essays in The Cosmopolitan Lyceum persuasively demonstrate that the lyceum encouraged a simultaneous outward-looking perspective – a consciousness of the world and peoples beyond the borders of the United States – which builds on and complicates prior scholarship. Drawing on explorations of the concept of cosmopolitanism by Kwame Anthony Appiah, Catherine Lu, Walter Mignolo, Bruce Robbins, and others, the authors of these essays demonstrate that lyceum lecturers succeeded in educating audiences in global cultures and urging them to think beyond a simple nationalistic or provincial view of the world. Tom F. Wright's thoughtful introduction and arrangement of the essays illuminate three major ways that the lyceum urged Americans to think in more cosmopolitan ways.
First, lecturers “fostered a public culture of cosmopolitanism” by calling forth their listeners as participants in a broader community of cosmopolitans (9). Nowhere is this more clear than in Ronald Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray's essay, which draws on a huge archive of manuscript diaries and letters that comment on antebellum American women's engagement with the books and other media they encountered. Such documents show that many women's encounters with the global did not begin and end with attending a single lecture; rather, a lecture could spur learning new languages, attending debates on international politics, and exploring ethnology. In other words, the global nature of many lyceum lectures did not rest solely in the content of the talks, but also in how those talks might encourage listeners to expand their interests and concerns.
Three remarkable essays by Robert Arbour, Virginia Garnett, and Paul Stob in the book's second section explore the complexities of authorship and public identity by lyceum lecturers. Building on their reputations as authors, lecturers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, William H. H. Murray (an Adirondacks mountaineer), and William James played with the expectations that their audiences brought with them. Arbour shows Emerson to have been a particularly Dylan-esque public speaker. He knew well that his attendees might find his writing to be “abstruse and ethereal,” but rather than simply enact his authorial persona onstage, he experimented with a range of personae (95). In fact, he was unusually willing to fail in his public talks as he tried out new ideas and new versions of his public self. “As that persona changes before their eyes, his listeners must reconcile for themselves a polyvocal Emerson, a cosmopolitan speaker who challenges their preconceptions about identity,” Arbour explains (101).
Third, the book explores whether the lyceum's internationally focussed lectures ultimately supported an imperialistic view of the world. Peter Gibian's terrific essay on Bayard Taylor explores that question in depth. Taylor, a world traveler and writer who became one of the lyceum's biggest attractions, as he dressed in the costume of the country under discussion and described his adventures thus in disguise, advocated a form of cosmopolitanism that recommended flexibility and adaptability even as he could also offer generalized cultural assessments of foreign peoples. “An American wearing Bedouin robes, familiar yet strange, Taylor appears before home audiences as an uncanny, hybrid figure, performing the transnational human identity he wants to evoke and celebrate,” Gibian writes (177–78). In other words, both the imperialistic and liberatory aspects of cosmopolitanism could exist in dynamic tension even in a single performer's lectures – but the tension between them did not necessarily leave audiences with a simplistic sense of cultural superiority.
Exploring the lyceum via the notion of cosmopolitanism thus not only casts new light on the lyceum that previous scholars, with their emphasis on its nation-building aspects, have not seen. In her essay, Angela Ray reflects on that prior scholarship and offers a considered conclusion. “I remain convinced … that much of lyceum practice promoted nation building,” she notes. Still, “national self-definition is created through contrast. In contemplating the global, lyceum participants could learn to identify particular values, beliefs, and knowledges as quintessentially American” (37). The best essays in the volume are unexpectedly rich, going far beyond the usual stuff of edited volumes. In addition, the cross-disciplinary emphasis (the authors represent English, history, and communications departments) and close connections between the essays make this an exceptional volume, one that offers new ideas about the American lyceum and engages thoughtfully with the literature on cosmopolitanism.
