How did Aboriginal audiences experience popular science when it unfolded on stage in a mission site? This chapter considers phrenological visits to Yorta Yorta country in south-eastern Australia, and particularly the lectures of JB Thomas at Maloga Mission in 1884 and John Joseph Sheridan at nearby Cummeragunja in 1892. Like other scientists and medical men who visited here, these men perpetuated scientific racism. But newspaper reports also point to the possibility of these lectures – which also included lantern slides – as moments of nuanced interaction from which Yorta Yorta and other Aboriginal residents derived value and pleasure, rather than as straightforward impositions. As participatory entertainments, such shows hinged on uncertain moments with mixed emotions on both sides. This chapter considers the possible ways that, within the local context, phrenology and rational amusement might have become items for perusal and collection by Aboriginal people negotiating two-way living in a changing world.

This essay explores the intersection of religion and literature in sermons and lectures during the British Romantic period. The essay traces the advance of elocutionary advice in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature and demonstrates how interest in orality proliferated the printing of both sermons and lectures on religious themes. In addition to noted figures such as S. T. Coleridge, William Hazlitt, and Edward Irving, women’s voices emerged during the time, as women in dissenting religious circles set the stage for the first public lectures by women in Britain.

Coetzee’s interest in, and ability to exploit, the conventions and expectations of genre is evident throughout his career; this chapter focuses on three examples in which the relation between fiction and non-fiction is put in question, Elizabeth Costello, Diary of a Bad Year, and Summertime. In the case of the first of these works, the chapter examines Coetzee’s conversion of lectures into a fiction, and asks how we are to take the opinions expressed by the eponymous individual. In the case of Diary of a Bad Year, it discusses Coetzee’s framing of diary entries within a fictional narrative, and considers the degree of authorial endorsement of the resulting ‘opinions’ and the effect of the story unfolding at the foot of the page. In Summertime, the generic challenge of a memoir supposedly written after the author’s death is explored, and attention is paid to the work’s status as autobiography and as comic self-interrogation.