Partial Histories


Book Description

This book explores the multiple portrayals of the actor and theatre manager Colley Cibber, king of the dunces, professional fop, defacer of Shakespeare and the cruel and unforgiving father of Charlotte Charke. But these portraits of Cibber are doubly partial, exposing even as they paper over gaps and biases in the archive while reflecting back modern desires and methodologies. The Colley Cibber ‘everybody knows’ has been variously constructed through the rise of English literature as both a cultural enterprise and an academic discipline, a process which made Shakespeare the ‘nation’s poet’ and canonised Cibber’s enemies Pope and Fielding; theatre history’s narrative of the birth of naturalism; and the reclamation and celebration of Charlotte Charke by women’s literary history. Each of these stories requires a Colley Cibber to be its butt, antithesis, and/or bête noir. This monograph challenges these partial histories and returns the theatre manager, playwright, poet laureate and bon viveur to the centre of eighteenth-century culture and cultural studies.




The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature


Book Description

From folk ballads to film scripts, this new five-volume encyclopedia covers the entire history of British literature from the seventh century to the present, focusing on the writers and the major texts of what are now the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. In five hundred substantial essays written by major scholars, the Encyclopedia of British Literature includes biographies of nearly four hundred individual authors and a hundred topical essays with detailed analyses of particular themes, movements, genres, and institutions whose impact upon the writing or the reading of literature was significant.An ideal companion to The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, this set will prove invaluable for students, scholars, and general readers.For more information, including a complete table of contents and list of contributors, please visit www.oup.com/us/ebl
















The Plays of Colley Cibber


Book Description

This volume provides the first new edition of Cibber's plays since 1777, and the first edition ever published that includes all of his known plays and that incorporates his extensive and often complex revisions. This modern-spelling edition features a comprehensive general introduction to Cibber's career, and separate introductions for each play, detailing sources, performance data, and publication history. Annotations and textual notes are included to allow for additional study.




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