CORROSIVE SOLACE Affect Biopolitics and the Realignment of the Repertoire 1780-1800

O'QUINN Daniel

ISBN 10: 1512823112 / ISBN 13: 9781512823110

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022. 9781512823110, 2022

About this Item

1st edn 1st printing. 8vo. Original gilt lettered blue cloth (Fine), dustwrapper (Fine). Pp. xii + 364, illus with b&w photos (no inscriptions).

Seller Inventory # 170064

Bibliographic Details

• Title: CORROSIVE SOLACE Affect Biopolitics and the Realignment of the Repertoire 1780-1800
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022. 9781512823110
• Publication Date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1512823112
• ISBN 13: 9781512823110
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
• Seller catalogs:
  • Modern History

About this title

Synopsis

In Corrosive Solace, Daniel O’Quinn argues that the loss of the American colonies instantiated a complex reorganization in sociability and politics in the British metropole that has had long-lasting effects on British national and imperial culture, which can be seen and analyzed within its performative repertoire. He examines how the analysis of feeling or affect can be deployed to address the inchoate causal relation between historical events and their mediation. In this sense, Corrosive Solace’s goals are twofold: first, to outline the methodologies necessary for dealing with the affective recognition of historical crisis; and second, to make the historically familiar strange again, and thus make visible key avenues for discussion that have remained dormant. Both of these objectives turn on recognition: How do we theorize the implicit affective recognition of crisis in a distant historical moment? And how do we recognize what we, in our present moment, cannot discern?

Corrosive Solace addresses this complex cultural reorientation by attending less to “new” cultural products than to the theoretical and historical problems posed by looking at the transformation of “old” plays and modes of performance. These “old” plays―Shakespeare, post-Restoration comedy and she-tragedy―were a vital plank of the cultural patrimony, so much of O’Quinn’s analysis lies in how tradition was recovered and redirected to meet urgent social and political needs. Across the arc of Corrosive Solace, he tracks how the loss of the American War forced Britons to refashion the repertoire of cultural signs and social dispositions that had subtended its first empire in the Atlantic world in a way more suited to its emergent empire in South Asia.

About the Author

Professor of the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph