Romantic Theatricality: Gender, Poetry, and Spectatorship - Hardcover

Pascoe, Judith

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801433045 ISBN 13: 9780801433047

Publisher: NCROL, 1997

Synopsis

In a significant reinterpretation of early Romanticism, Judith Pascoe shows how English literary culture in the 1790s came to be shaped by the theater and by the public's fascination with theater. Pascoe focuses on a number of intriguing historical occurrences of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, emphasizing how writers in all areas of public life relied upon theatrical modes of self-representation. Pascoe adduces as evidence the theatrical posturing of the Della Cruscan poets, the staginess of the Marie Antoinette depicted in women's poetry, and the histrionic maneuverings of participants in the 1794 treason trials. Such public events as the treason trials also linked the newly powerful role of female theatrical spectator to that of political spectator. New forms of self representation and dramatization arose from that synthesis.In their uniting of theatrical and literary realms, Pascoe maintains, women writers were inspired by the most famous actress of the era, Sarah Siddons. Siddons's shrewd deployment of her private life in the construction of her public persona serves as a model for such disparate poets as Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson.

About this title

Review

"Pascoe . . . examines the age's fascination with theater and the pervasive theatricality and deliberate staginess―both of its verse and in the lives of a host of Romantic era writers, actors, and politicians. . . . There are wonderful discussions of the actress Mrs. Siddons as cultural icon, of the Della Cruscan poets (and magazine poetry, generally), the image of Marie Antoinette in women's poetry, the careful staging of the 1794 treason trails, Wordsworth's highly artificial naturalness, and many less studied writers (Mary Robinson, Charlotte Smith, Letitia Landon). Throughout, Pascoe shows how Romantic spectatorship (in both literature and life) was gendered female―a shrewd and sensible idea that suggests useful new approaches to a host of Romantic texts."―Choice

"There is much in Romantic Theatricality . . . that students of romanticism and of the long eighteenth century in general are bound to find useful and provocative."―William Galperin, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900

"An ingenious and eclectic study. . . . Pascoe's ambitious book prompts the reader's interest through her lucid prose and yoking of unexpected elements of society."―European Romantic Review

"This lucid, wide-ranging book offers a striking new way of understanding the currently much-contested category of the 'Romantic.' The aesthetics of high Romanticism have of course been long defined in terms of a lyric sensibility and a marked antitheatricality, but Pascoe shows that this view must be revised if one is to account for women writers in this period . . . . One is reluctant to see this book, like any fine performance, come to an end. "―Andrea Henderson. Modern Philology

"In Romantic Theatricality, Pascoe enacts a wholesale revision of a commonplace about romantic literature, making theater, rather than, say, nature, the governing metaphor and inspiration for poetic self-fashioning in the 1790s. . . . Productive and variable. One impression left by this book is how wide-ranging the forms and effects of theatricality can be, from high tragedy to newspaper puffery, from myth-making to money-making, from harlots to fairies. Pascoe does not try to pin down the vagaries loaded into the term, but lets theatricality parade itself in a number of unusual and even contradictory guises . . . in clean, engaging prose."―Mary A. Favret, Studies in Romanticism

"Pascoe presents a picture of early Romanticism as a culture deeply ambivalent about theatricality and spectacle. . . . The real energy of this book comes from its cultural materials, those fascinating glimpses into something that I can call only by the name so rightly problematized by Joan Scott and others: 'experience.'"―Kristina Straub, Signs

Edition details

• Publisher: NCROL
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0801433045
• ISBN 13: 9780801433047
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 251