Interculturalism and Resistance in the London Theater, 1660-1800

Interculturalism and Resistance in the London Theater, 1660-1800
Author: Mita Choudhury
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2000
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780838754481

In an original contribution to criticism, Interculturalism and Resistance demonstrates the eighteenth-century theatrical culture's ambivalence toward what has recently been described as the "exoticism of multiculturalism.""--BOOK JACKET.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Richard Brinsley Sheridan
Author: Jack E. DeRochi
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2013
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1611484804

This new collection of essays on Richard Brinsley Sheridan brings the most important British playwright of the eighteenth century back to the forefront of literary and cultural studies of the era. While his pyrotechnic life as a romantic hero, playwright, Member of Parliament, and theatre manager has generated a number of recent biographies, it is Sheridan's works--not just plays but also poetry and orations--that endure. These essays reclaim the legacy of the man of letters and partisan bon vivant who burst from obscurity to become a powerful cultural force in Georgian London. This collection covers the many lives of Sheridan, taking into account both his variegated career and the competing accounts of the man, as well as his early verse, which lays the foundation for his success as a playwright. Chapters are devoted to Sheridan's theatre, and provide innovative readings of his most famous dramatic pieces: The Rivals, The Duenna, The School for Scandal, The Critic, and Pizarro. The volume also includes extensive discussion of the dramatic highs of Sheridan's long political career, thus placing the playwright-politician firmly in the world in which performance and politics were inextricably entwined. Contributors: Mita Choudhury, Jack E. DeRochi, Marianna D'Ezio, Daniel J. Ennis, Emily Friedman, Steven Gores, David Haley, Robert W. Jones, Daniel O'Quinn, Glynis Ridley, John Vance, David Francis Taylor

Women Writing Music in Late Eighteenth-Century England

Women Writing Music in Late Eighteenth-Century England
Author: Leslie Ritchie
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351536613

Combining new musicology trends, formal musical analysis, and literary feminist recovery work, Leslie Ritchie examines rare poetic, didactic, fictional, and musical texts written by women in late eighteenth-century Britain. She finds instances of and resistance to contemporary perceptions of music as a form of social control in works by Maria Barth?mon, Harriett Abrams, Mary Worgan, Susanna Rowson, Hannah Cowley, and Amelia Opie, among others. Relating women's musical compositions and writings about music to theories of music's function in the formation of female subjectivities during the latter half of the eighteenth century, Ritchie draws on the work of cultural theorists and cultural historians, as well as feminist scholars who have explored the connection between femininity and performance. Whether crafting works consonant with societal ideals of charitable, natural, and national order, or re-imagining their participation in these musical aids to social harmony, women contributed significantly to the formation of British cultural identity. Ritchie's interdisciplinary book will interest scholars working in a range of fields, including gender studies, musicology, eighteenth-century British literature, and cultural studies.

Rushing Into Floods

Rushing Into Floods
Author: Gunda Windmüller
Publisher: V&R unipress GmbH
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2012
Genre: History
ISBN: 3899719689

The dramatic representation of maritime spaces, characters and plots in Restoration and early eighteenth-century English theatres served as a crucial discursive negotiation of a burgeoning empire. This study focuses on staging the sea in a period of growing maritime, commercial and colonial activity, a time when the prominence of the sea and shipping was firmly established in the very fabric of English life. As theatres were re-established after the Restoration, playhouses soon became very visible spaces of cultural activity and important locales for staging cultural contact and conflict. Plays staging the sea can be read as central in representing the budding maritime empire to metropolitan audiences, as well as negotiating political power and knowledge about the other. The study explores well-known plays by authors such as Aphra Behn and William Wycherley alongside a host of more obscure plays by authors such as Edward Ravenscroft and Charles Gildon as cultural performances for negotiating cultural identity and difference in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Fabulous Orients

Fabulous Orients
Author: Rosalind Ballaster
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 423
Release: 2005-10-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0199267332

The first book-length study of the oriental tale in England since 1908, Fabulous Orients is an original work of criticism which illustrates the centrality of narratives of and from the eastern territories of Turkey, Persia, China, and India in the formation of the novel and constructions of western identity in a culture on the threshold of empire.

Feminist Comedy

Feminist Comedy
Author: Willow White
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 148
Release: 2024-06-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1644533421

Feminist Comedy: Women Playwrights of London identifies the eighteenth-century comedic stage as a key site of feminist critique, practice, and experimentation. While the history of feminism and comedy is undeniably vexed, by focusing on five women playwrights of the latter half of the eighteenth century--Catherine Clive, Frances Brooke, Frances Burney, Hannah Cowley, and Elizabeth Inchbald--this book demonstrates that stage comedy was crucial to these women’s professional success in a male-dominated industry and reveals a unifying thread of feminist critique that connects their works. Though male detractors denied women’s comic ability throughout the era, eighteenth-century women playwrights were on the cutting edge of comedy and their work had important feminist influence that can be traced to today’s stages and screens.

New Perspectives on Delarivier Manley and Eighteenth Century Literature

New Perspectives on Delarivier Manley and Eighteenth Century Literature
Author: Aleksondra Hultquist
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2016-07-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317196929

This first critical collection on Delarivier Manley revisits the most heated discussions, adds new perspectives in light of growing awareness of Manley’s multifaceted contributions to eighteenth-century literature, and demonstrates the wide range of thinking about her literary production and significance. While contributors reconsider some well-known texts through her generic intertextuality or unresolved political moments, the volume focuses more on those works that have had less attention: dramas, correspondence, journalistic endeavors, and late prose fiction. The methodological approaches incorporate traditional investigations of Manley, such as historical research, gender theory, and comparative close readings, as well as some recently influential theories, like geocriticism and affect studies. This book forges new paths in the many underdeveloped directions in Manley scholarship, including her work’s exploration of foreign locales, the power dynamics between individuals and in relation to states, sexuality beyond heteronormativity, and the shifting operations and influences of genre. While it draws on previous writing about Manley’s engagement with Whig/Tory politics, gender, and queerness, it also argues for Manley’s contributions as a writer with wide-ranging knowledge of both the inner sanctums of London and the outer developing British Empire, an astute reader of politics, a sophisticated explorer of emotional and gender dynamics, and a flexible and clever stylist. In contrast to the many ways Manley has been too easily dismissed, this collection carefully considers many points of view, and opens the way for new analyses of Manley’s life, work, and vital contributions to the full range of forms in which she wrote.

The Celebrated Hannah Cowley

The Celebrated Hannah Cowley
Author: Angela Escott
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2015-10-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317323475

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.

New Readings in the Literature of British India, c. 1780-1947

New Readings in the Literature of British India, c. 1780-1947
Author: Shafquat Towheed
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2007-10-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3838256735

The contributions to this book amply demonstrate the richness, vitality, and complexity of the colonial transactions between Britain and India over the last two centuries, and they do so by approaching the topic from a specific perspective: by interpreting the rubric 'new readings' as broadly, creatively, and productively as possible. They cover a wide range of literary responses and genres: eighteenth-century drama, the gothic novel, verse, autobiography, history, religious writing, journalism, women's memoirs, travel writing, popular fiction, and the modernist novel. Brought together in one volume, these essays offer a small, but representative sample of the multifaceted literary and cultural traffic between Britain and India in the colonial period. In the richness and diversity of the various contributors' strategies and interpretations, these new readings urge us to return once again to texts that we think we know, as well as to explore those that we do not, with a freshly renewed sense of their complexity, immediacy, and relevance.

The Rise and Fall of Rape on the English Stage

The Rise and Fall of Rape on the English Stage
Author: Anne Greenfield
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 106
Release: 2024-08-19
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1040102549

This book examines one of the most pervasive and successful dramatic tropes of the Restoration and early eighteenth century: sexual violence. During this sixty-year span, there were over fifty tragic and tragi-comedic productions that showcased rape and/or attempted rape—a remarkable number that was unprecedented in English dramatic history. Rape was not merely depicted more frequently during the Restoration, but it was also placed at the center of more plots, given more pathetic emphasis, and even staged more centrally. Restoration dramatists were the first to revolve routinely entire plots around the rapes of their innocent heroines, to give powerful voices to these heroines post-rape, and to imbue their sexually violent scenes with new and attention-getting staging techniques, such as discovery scenes. As this book argues, sexual violence emerged at this time as a highly flexible dramatic trope that could be used to illustrate terrifying political scenarios, elicit extreme pathos in audiences, and demonstrate the bearing that lost chastity had on social stability. It is precisely the rich, multi-faceted appeal of these productions—politically, sexually, visually, and culturally—that explains the popularity and significance of this dramatic trope on the English stage. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in Restoration, eighteenth-century studies, and theatre and performance studies.