Ireland, Enlightenment and the English Stage, 1740-1820
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Cambridge University Press
Published:1st Aug '19
Should be back in stock very soon
This hardback is available in another edition too:
- Paperback£30.99(9781108703154)
Reveals the contribution of Irish writers to the Georgian English stage; argues that theatre is an important strand of the Irish Enlightenment.
Scholars of eighteenth-century Britain, Ireland, and Enlightenment theatre will welcome this book as it uncovers the considerable contribution made by Irish actors and playwrights to Georgian English theatre. It connects Irish patriotism with new historiography, revealing how theatrical culture demanded political and economic autonomy.The theatre was a crucial forum for the representation of Irish civility and culture for the eighteenth-century English audience. Irish actors and playwrights, operating both as individuals and within networks, were remarkably popular and potent during this period, especially in London. As ideas of Enlightenment percolated throughout Britain and Ireland, Irish theatrical practitioners - actors, managers, playwrights, critics and journalists - exploited a growing receptivity to Irish civility, and advanced a patriot agenda of political and economic autonomy. Mobility, toleration and the capacity to negotiate multiple allegiances are marked features of this Irish theatrical Enlightenment, whose ambitious participants saw little conflict between their twin loyalties to the Crown and to Ireland. This collection of essays responds to recent work in the areas of eighteenth-century theatre studies, Irish studies and Enlightenment studies. The volume's discussions of genre, colonialism, gender, race, music, slavery, and dress open up new avenues of scholarship and research across disciplines.
'Ireland, Enlightenment and the English Stage makes a bold and necessary intervention in the field. Its essays shed important new light on the dynamic contribution to English theatrical culture made by a multitude of Irish practitioners and also productively challenge the foundations of what we take 'the Enlightenment' to be in relation to ideas of nation, cosmopolitanism, and cultural production.' David Taylor, University of Oxford
Burke's essay … strikes a note that synthesizes the volume. Theater, she writes, becomes a crucial vehicle for the spread of Enlightenment as it enables 'a broadening of horizons [that] did not require a jettisoning of the past'. In this volume, whose essays consistently pair careful historicist research with innovative thought, O'Shaughnessy and his fellow contributors exemplify this achievement for current scholarship as well.' Emily Hodgson Anderson, Review 19
'Reconstructing and analysing the world of eighteenth-century theatre moreover demands research that extends beyond literary texts and is attentive to the contexts and the meanings of performance, and the different ways in which both text and performance were mediated and remediated in the period. The essays in this impressive collection not only navigate these challenges, they showcase an impressive sophistication in both the methods and approach employed, and in their nuanced conceptualization of the issues of identity on which the collection is focused ... This superb collection makes an important intervention in a number of different fields and should be considered essential reading for scholars of eighteenth-century Ireland across a range of disciplines, as well as for critics and historians of theatre in the long eighteenth century.' Clíona Ó Gallchoir, Eighteenth-Century Ireland
'[an] impressive overview of a missing Irish theater history …' Misty G. Anderson, ECS Review
ISBN: 9781108498142
Dimensions: 235mm x 158mm x 17mm
Weight: 590g
282 pages