“All the World’s a Stage and All the Men Are Merely Players”: Theatre-Going in London During the Hundred Days
March 2018
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Chapter
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Napoleon's Hundred Days and the Politics of Legitimacy (War, Culture and Society, 1750-1850)
British Women Writers of Peninsular Fiction
January 2018
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Chapter
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Spain in British Romanticism: 1800-1840
This collection of thirteen specially commissioned essays by international scholars takes a fresh look at the profound impact of the Peninsular War on Romantic British literature and culture. The expertly authored chapters explore the valorization of Spain by nineteenth-century poets such as Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, Robert Southey, S.T. Coleridge, the Shelleys, and Felicia Hemans in contrast to the Enlightenment-era view of Spain as a backwards nation in decline. Topics discussed include the vision of Spain in Gothic fiction, Spanish experiences of exile as exemplified by the conflict between Valentin de Llanos and Joseph Blanco White, and British women writers' approach to peninsular fiction.
Literary Criticism
The Changing Theatrical Economy: Charles Dibdin the Younger at Sadler's Wells, 1814-19
January 2018
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Chapter
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Charles Dibdin and Late Georgian Culture
Literary Criticism
Empire, Revolution and Patriotism in Thomas Morton’s Columbus; Or, A World Discovered (1792)
October 2016
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Chapter
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Staging History 1780-1840
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, historical subjects became some of the most popular topics for stage dramas of all kinds on both sides of the Atlantic. This collection of essays examines a number of extraordinary theatrical works in order to cast light on their role in shaping a popular interpretation of historical events. The medium of drama ensured that the telling of these histories - the French Revolution and the American War of Independence, for example, or the travels of Captain Cook and Christopher Columbus - were brought to life through words, music and spectacle. The scale of the productions was often ambitious: a water tank with model floating ships was deployed at Sadler's Wells for the staging of the Siege of Gibraltar, and another production on the same theme used live cannons which set fire to the vessels in each performance. This illustrated volume, researched and written by experts in the field, explores contemporary theatrical documents (playbills, set designs, musical scores) and images (paintings, prints and illustrations) in seeking to explain what counted as history and historical truth for the writers, performers and audiences of these plays. In doing so it debates the peculiar contradictions of staging history and re-examines some spectacular box office hits.
Performing Arts
Staging the Peninsular War
August 2015
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Book
From Napoleon's invasion of Portugal in 1807 to his final defeat at Waterloo, the English theatres played a crucial role in the mediation of the Peninsular campaign. In the first in-depth study of English theatre during the Peninsular War, Susan Valladares contextualizes the theatrical treatment of the war within the larger political and ideological axes of Romantic performance. Exploring the role of spectacle in the mediation of war and the links between theatrical productions and print culture, she argues that the popularity of theatre-going and the improvisation and topicality unique to dramatic performance make the theatre an ideal lens for studying the construction of the Peninsular War in the public domain. Without simplifying the complex issues involved in the study of citizenship, communal identities, and ideological investments, Valladares recovers a wartime theatre that helped celebrate military engagements, reform political sympathies, and register the public’s complex relationship with Britain’s military campaign in the Iberian Peninsula. From its nuanced reading of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's Pizarro (1799), to its accounts of wartime productions of Shakespeare, description of performances at the minor theatres, and detailed case study of dramatic culture in Bristol, Valladares’s book reveals how theatrical entertainments reflected and helped shape public feeling on the Peninsular campaign.
theatre, England, history, Peninsular War, literature and war, English drama, 19th century, History and criticism, War in literature, Soldiers in literature
JULIA SWINDELLS and DAVID FRANCIS TAYLOR (eds). The Oxford Handbook of The Georgian Theatre 1737-1832.
April 2015
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Journal article
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The Review of English Studies
Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Peter Sabor and Fiona Ritchie
January 2014
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Journal article
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Theatre Notebook: a journal of the history and technique of the British theatre
Theatres of Opposition: Empire, Revolution & Richard Brinsley Sheridan, by David Francis Taylor [Book review]
January 2014
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Journal article
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Theatre Notebook: a journal of the history and technique of the British theatre
Teaching Guide for: Anne Lister and the Ladies of Llangollen
November 2013
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Journal article
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Literature Compass
“For the sake of illustrating principles”: Wordsworth, the Convention of Cintra, and Satirical Prints
October 2013
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Journal article
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European Romantic Review
An Introduction to the ‘literary person[s]’ of Anne Lister and the Ladies of Llangollen
April 2013
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Journal article
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Literature Compass
AbstractAnne Lister eagerly looked forward to her tour of North Wales in July 1822 – a tour made in the company of a dear aunt, and whose principal highlight would be a visit to Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, the celebrated Ladies of Llangollen. Ten days prior to her departure, Lister received a letter from her friend, Isabel Dalton, reassuring her that apparently ‘no introduction’ to the Ladies would be necessary: “Any literary person especially calling on them would be taken as a compliment.” Butler and Ponsonby were accustomed to receiving visits from the best of ‘literary persons’, including William Wordsworth, Caroline Lamb, Edmund Burke, and Sir Walter Scott. While Lister lacked such illustrious renown, she was certainly qualified to make the visit. Her diaries reveal that Halifax Library was one of her regular haunts, that she kept careful note of her reading, regularly perused literary reviews, and enjoyed performing favourite book passages and songs to friends and family. She relied on her literary knowledge to further her amorous intrigues, was generous in her presentation of bound books as gifts and love tokens, and confided in a select few of her ‘ambition in the literary way’ and related wish for ‘a name in the world’. Unsurprisingly then, the Ladies of Llangollen’s ‘rustic library’ made an immediate impression on Lister, who warmly admired their ‘little bookcase with 30 or 40 little volumes [of] chiefly poetry, Spenser, Chaucer, Pope, Cowper, Homer, Shakespeare, etc. –’. For their part, Butler and Ponsonby were ‘always reading’; or, in their own words, indulging in ‘the exquisite pleasures of retirement and the luxury of purchasing books’.A study of the literary interests and reading practices recorded by Lister and the Ladies of Llangollen offers a valuable extension to our understanding of these fascinating diarists and the importance placed by all three women on the desirability of a literary mindset. In its investigation of the links between textuality and subjectivity, my article considers the meanings associated with different reading spaces, and how the literary pursuits of Anne Lister and the Ladies of Llangollen related to their larger academic interests, attitudes to female education, sexual identity, and financial independence.
‘Walter Scott’s Vision of Don Roderick (1811): “A Drum and Trumpet Performance”?’
December 2012
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Journal article
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Cuadernos de Ilustración y Romanticismo
The BARS Review
January 2012
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Book
Women’s Romantic Theatre and Drama: History, Agency, and Performativity [Book review]
December 2011
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Journal article
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British Association of Romantic Studies: Bulletin & Review
Spanish America and British Romanticism 1777-1826, by R. Cole Heinowitz
August 2011
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Journal article
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Symbiosis: a journal of anglo-american literary relations
‘“He that can bring the dead to life again”: Resurrecting the Spanish setting of Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) and Remorse (1813)’.
October 2010
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Chapter
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Romanticism and the Anglo-Hispanic Imaginary
Romantic Englishwomen and “the Theatre of Glory”: The Role of the Peninsular War in Forging British National Identity
January 2008
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Journal article
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Movable Type
Celebrity, Performance, Reception: British Georgian Theatre as Social Assemblage by David Worrall
Journal article
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The Coleridge Bulletin
Empire, Revolution and Patriotism in Morton’s Columbus: Or, A World Discovered
Chapter
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Staging History, 1780–1840
theatre, history, 18th century, 19th century
Review of British Drama of the Industrial Revolution, by Frederick Burwick