Feminist Comedy


Book Description

Feminist Comedy: Women Playwrights of London identifies the eighteenth-century comedic stage as a key site of feminist critique, practice, and experimentation. While the history of feminism and comedy is undeniably vexed, by focusing on five women playwrights of the latter half of the eighteenth century--Catherine Clive, Frances Brooke, Frances Burney, Hannah Cowley, and Elizabeth Inchbald--this book demonstrates that stage comedy was crucial to these women’s professional success in a male-dominated industry and reveals a unifying thread of feminist critique that connects their works. Though male detractors denied women’s comic ability throughout the era, eighteenth-century women playwrights were on the cutting edge of comedy and their work had important feminist influence that can be traced to today’s stages and screens.




British Women Poets of the Romantic Era


Book Description

This groundbreaking volume not only documents the richness of their literary contributions but changes our thinking about the poetry of the English Romantic period.










Getting Into the Act


Book Description

Getting Into the Act is a vigorous and refreshing account of seven female playwrights who, against all odds, enjoyed professional success in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Ellen Donkin relates fascinating, disturbing tales about the male theatre managers to whom they were indebted, and the trials and prejudices they endured, ranging from accusations of plagiarism to sexual harassment. This scarred turbulent early history still resonates in the late twentieth-century. The current ratio of female to male playwrights is virtually unchanged. Old patterns of male control persist, and playwriting continues to be a hazardous occupation for women. But within these scarred earlier histories there are equally powerful narratives of self-revelation, endurance, and professional triumph that may point to a new way forward. Getting Into the Act is entertaining and informative reading for anyone, from scholar to general reader, who is interested in the history and gender politics of the stage.










Historical Dictionary of Romanticism in Literature


Book Description

The Historical Dictionary of Romanticism in Literature provides a large overview of the Romantic Movement that seemed at the time to have swept across Europe from Russia to Germany and France, to Britain, and across the Atlantic to the United States. The Romantics saw themselves as inaugurating a new era. They frequently referred to themselves or their contemporaries as Romantics and their art as Romantic. From the early stirrings in Germany, to the last decade of the eighteenth century in England with the political radicals and the Lake Poets, to the Transcendental Club in Massachusetts, the leaders of the age acknowledged their new Romantic attitudes. This volume takes a close and comprehensive look at romanticism in literature through a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 800 cross-referenced entries on the writers and the poems, novels, short stories and essays, plays, and other works they produced; the leading trends, techniques, journals, and literary circles and the spirit of the times are also covered. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more romanticism in literature.