The "(re)turn to history" in Romantic Studies in the 1980s marked the beginning of a critical orthodoxy that continues to condition, if not define, our sense of the Romantic period twenty-five years on. Romantic New Historicism’s revisionary engagements have played a central role in the realignment of the field and in the expansion of the Romantic canon. In this major new collection of eleven essays, critics reflect on New Historicism’s inheritance, its achievements and its limitations. Integrating a self-reflexive engagement with New Historicism’s "history" and detailed attention to a range of Romantic lives and literary texts, the collection offers a close-up view of Romanticism’s hybrid present, and a dynamic vision of its future.
Throughout her works, Mary Wollstonecraft interrogates and represents the connected network of theater, culture, and self-representation, in what Lisa Plummer Crafton argues is a conscious appropriation of theater in its literal, cultural, and figurative dimensions. Situating Wollstonecraft within early Romantic debates about theatricality, she explores Wollstonecraft's appropriation of, immersion in, and contributions to these debates within the contexts of philosophical arguments about the utility of theater and spectacle; the political discourse of the French Revolution; juridical transcripts of treason and civil divorce trials; and the spectacle of the female actress in performance, as typified by Sarah Siddons and her compelling connections to Wollstonecraft on and off stage. As she considers Wollstonecraft's contributions to competing notions of the theatrical, from the writer's earliest literary reviews and translations through her histories, correspondence, nonfiction, and novels, Crafton traces the trajectory of Wollstonecraft's conscious appropriation of the trope and her emphasis on theatricality's transgressive potential for self-invention. Crafton's book, the first wide-ranging study of theatricality in the works of Wollstonecraft, is an important contribution to current reconsiderations of the earlier received wisdom about Romantic anti-theatricality, to historicist revisions of the performance and theory of Sarah Siddons, and to theories of spectacle and gender.
Die europäische Romantik war nicht nur heterogen und intern zerstritten. Sie hatte sich auch gegen Aufklärung und Klassizismus zu verteidigen, welche um die Zeit der Französischen Revolution weiterlebten. Klassizisten betrachteten die Romantik als Anhäufung abtrünniger »neuer Schulen«, die das Monopol der Classical Tradition bedrohten. Die erbitterten Debatten in Ästhetik und Politik wurden auf beiden Seiten mit den überkommenen Strategien der klassischen »ars disputandi« geführt. Unter schwerstem satirischem Beschuss begann die Romantik, sich als eine Bewegung zu begreifen, und es entstand der problematische Gegensatz von »klassisch« und »romantisch«. Diese Konstruktion war aber unverzichtbar, um die Fronten im Wirrwarr der Stimmen zu klären, und blieb es auch in der Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft, die auf solche Subsumptionen nicht verzichten kann. Die Classical Tradition, die das Christentum einschließt, erweist sich als ein laufender Prozess von der Antike bis heute.
Hannah Cowley (1743–1809) was a very successful dramatist, and something of an eighteenth-century celebrity. New critical interest in the drama of this period has meant a resurgence of interest in Cowley’s writing and in the performance of her plays. This is the first substantial monograph study to examine Cowley’s life and work.
A revelatory history of the characters that playwrights and managers created out of the real lives of women in intimate relationships with military men to serve Great Britain's greatest needs during the war-saturated eighteenth century. During the long eighteenth century, Great Britain was almost continuously at war. As the era unfolded, the theatre gradually discovered the potential in having actresses, recently introduced to the stage in the 1660s, perform as wartime women characters. As playwrights and managers began casting women in transformative roles to meet each major national need, female characters came to be central figures in bringing the war home to the nation, transforming them into deeply patriotic British subjects. Paula Backscheider's Women in Wartime is the first study of theatrical representations of women with intimate connections to military men. Drawing upon her extensive expertise in gender, performance studies, popular culture, and archival studies, Backscheider traces the rise of the London theatre's acceptance that one of its responsibilities was to support its country's wars. Rather than focusing on the historical, mythical "warrior women" on the battlefield who have been much studied, Backscheider explores the lives and work of sweethearts, wives, mothers, sisters, barmaids, provision sellers, seaport prostitutes, and more, whose relationships to active-duty men made them recruits, volunteers, or even conscripts. They represent a distinct group of thousands of real women, and the actresses who portrayed them gave performances of change, struggle, celebration, mourning, survival, love, and patriotism. Backscheider explicates more than fifty plays—from main pieces, short farces, interludes, afterpieces, and comic operas to entr'actes, pantomimes, and even masques—as both entertainment and as ideological and propagandistic vehicles in times of severe crises. She also reveals how these works, many written by men with military experience, attest to the context of difficult, inescapable realities and momentous needs. Through the debunking of sexual stereotypes and attention to audience-pleasing roles such as impoverished-wife and breeches parts, Backscheider adds a dimension to theatrical history that substantially contributes to women's and military histories. Women in Wartime demonstrates the startling acuity and prescience of the repertoire in responding to the war-steeped culture of the period.
The Oxford Handbook of the Georgian Theatre 1737-1832 provides an essential guide to theatre in Britain between the passing of the Stage Licensing Act in 1737 and the Reform Act of 1832 — a period of drama long neglected but now receiving significant scholarly attention. Written by specialists from a range of disciplines, its forty essays both introduce students and scholars to the key texts and contexts of the Georgian theatre and also push the boundaries of the field, asking questions that will animate the study of drama in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries for years to come. The Handbook gives equal attention to the range of dramatic forms — not just tragedy and comedy, but the likes of melodrama and pantomime — as they developed and overlapped across the period, and to the occasions, communities, and materialities of theatre production. It includes sections on historiography, the censorship and regulation of drama, theatre and the Romantic canon, women and the stage, and the performance of race and empire. In doing so, the Handbook shows the centrality of theatre to Georgian culture and politics, and paints a picture of a stage defined by generic fluidity and experimentation; by networks of performance that spread far beyond London; by professional women who played pivotal roles in every aspect of production; and by its complex mediation of contemporary attitudes of class, race, and gender.
Tragedy Walks the Streets challenges the conventional understanding that the evolution of European drama effectively came to a halt during France's Revolutionary era. In this interdisciplinary history on the emergence of modern drama in European culture, Matthew S. Buckley contends that the political theatricality of the Revolution tested and forced the evolution of dramatic forms, supplanting the theater itself as the primary stage of formal development. Drawing on a wide range of texts and images, he demonstrates how the social and political enlistment of dramatic theatricality inflected rising social and political tensions in pre-Revolutionary France, shaped French Revolutionary political culture, conditioned British political and cultural responses to the Revolution, and served as the impetus for Büchner’s radical formal innovations of the 1830s. Setting aside traditional boundaries of literary scholarship, Buckley pursues instead a history of dramatic form that encompasses the full range of dramatic activity in the changing cultural life of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, including art, architecture, journalism, political performance, and social behavior. Surveying this expanded field of inquiry, Buckley weaves together a coherent formal genealogy of the drama during this period and offers a new, more continuous generic history of modern drama in its first and most turbulent phase of development.
Erotic Coleridge charts Coleridge's prolific creation of love poems from early flirtatious verse to poems about marital incompatibility, the blank faces of young women fearing for their reputations, the obliterating seductions of young women, the exaltation of falling in love, the spoken and sung voices of women, the pain of jealousy, and late meditations on how to live with the waning of love. In his prose he responds to Parliamentary debates about punishing adulteresses and gives advice about how marriage can warp the soul. In his sensual exuberance and his ethics of reverencing the individuality of other persons, Coleridge attends closely to the lives of women.
As theatre and drama of the Romantic Period undergo a critical reassessment among scholars internationally, the contributions of women as playwrights, actresses, and managers are also being revalued. This volume, which brings together leading British, North American, and Italian critics, is a crucial step towards reclaiming the importance of women's dramatic and theatrical activities during the period. Writing for the theatre implied assuming a public role, a hazardous undertaking for women who, especially after the French Revolution, were assigned to the private, primarily domestic, sphere. As the contributors examine the covert strategies women used to become full participants in the public theatre, they shed light on the issue of women's agency, expressed both through the writing of highly politicized or ethicized drama, as in the case of Elizabeth Inchbald or Joanna Baillie, and through women's professional practice as theatre managers and stage producers, as in the case of Elizabeth Vestris and Jane Scott. Among the topics considered are women's history plays, domesticity, ethics and sexuality in women's closet drama, the politics of drama and performance, and the role of women as managers and producers. Specialists in performance studies, Romantic Period drama, and women's writing will find the essays both challenging and inspiring.