Cultural Readings of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century English Theater - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0820316814 ISBN 13: 9780820316819

Publisher: Univ of Georgia Pr

Synopsis

Ranging in approach from feminist to historicist, the eleven essays in this collection share the culturalist premise that the drama of late Stuart and early Georgian England helped to constitute the dominant ideology of the period. The contributors' varied approaches allow for the reconsideration of libertinism, the politics of sexual desire, and other classic issues, as well as such newer concerns as the social construction of the first English actresses, empiricism as an emergent epistemological discourse, cultural anxiety about novelty and repetition, and shifting tropes of inherent worth.

About this title

About the Author:

J. Douglas Canfield (1941–2003) was Regents’ Professor of English at the University of Arizona. He was the author or editor of numerous books including The Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century Drama and The Baroque in English Neoclassical Literature. Deborah Payne Fisk is an associate professor of literature at American University. She is editor of Four Restoration Libertine Plays and The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre.

Review:

This work will assume a respected place within the current critical work on Restoration and eighteenth-century literature. These essays are consistently engaging and quite timely.

(Jill Campbell Yale University)

The essays are composed in a great variety of voices, and cover a range of theoretical and critical interests that defy easy conflation. They successfully engage this problem because they construe the plays anew by refusing any singular or monolithic conception of their sociality.

(Michael McKeon Rutgers University)

About this edition

• Publisher: Univ of Georgia Pr
• ISBN 10: 0820316814
• ISBN 13: 9780820316819
• Binding: Hardcover
• Editor: Canfield J. Douglas, Payne Deborah C.