A Race Of Female Patriots: Women and Public Spirit on the British Stage, 1688–1745 (Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650–1850) - Hardcover

Wilson, Brett

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1611483646 ISBN 13: 9781611483642

Publisher: Bucknell University Press, 2011

Synopsis

A Race of Female Patriots argues that public-spirited women proliferated on the eighteenth-century British stage to catalyze an affective experience of political belonging, as dramatists imagined new forms of affiliation, allegiance, and loyalty suitable to the new British constitution established bythe Glorious Revolution of 1688. Brett D. Wilson examines both staples of the repertory (The Fair Penitent, Jane Shore) and lesser-known plays (Liberty Asserted, The Revolution of Sweden, Edward and Eleonora) to define the parameters of a prevalent yet under-examined dramatic mode: “civic” dramas that use scenes of political strife and private distress to stage the fashioning of communities around women. Onstage, women act to benefit the public—crucially, Wilson argues, by infusing the commonwealth with sentimental ardor: public spirit. Playwrights like Nicholas Rowe, Catharine Trotter, John Dennis, and James Thomson make the female-centered unions they imagine into synecdoches for a British nation transformed from turmoil to harmony. Restoring to view key neglected texts that portray women who feel deeply as agents of inclusion and icons of civic virtue, A Race of Female Patriots is a persuasive study of tragic drama at a time of great political change that yields new insight into the relation between women, feeling, and the public sphere.

About this title

About the Author:

Brett D. Wilson is associate professor of English at the College of William & Mary. His articles on sympathy and national feeling in eighteenth-century British drama have appeared in ELH and Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Review:

A Race of Female Patriots is fine study of a select number of political dramas in the first half of the eighteenth century. ... Wilson has given us a provocative study of eighteenth-century tragedies. His analysis expands our understanding of the impact of revolutionary rhetoric beyond the more familiar political essays and disputes of the first half of the eighteenth century. (Modern Philology)

The strength of the book lies in the way it provides a new sense of the cultural logic of these texts considered generically as exemplars of a specifically Whig ideology. (American Behavioral Scientist)

About this edition

• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1611483646
• ISBN 13: 9781611483642
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 310