Romantic Theatricality : : Gender, Poetry, and Spectatorship / / Judith Pascoe.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Archive Pre-2000
• VerfasserIn: Pascoe, Judith,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2019]; ©1997
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (272 p.) :; 23 halftones

In a significant reinterpretation of early Romanticism, Judith Pascoe shows how English literary culture in the 1790s came to be shaped by the theater and by the public's fascination with theater. Pascoe focuses on a number of intriguing historical occurrences of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, emphasizing how writers in all areas of public life relied upon theatrical modes of self-representation. Pascoe adduces as evidence the theatrical posturing of the Della Cruscan poets, the staginess of the Marie Antoinette depicted in women's poetry, and the histrionic maneuverings of participants in the 1794 treason trials. Such public events as the treason trials also linked the newly powerful role of female theatrical spectator to that of political spectator. New forms of self representation and dramatization arose from that synthesis.In their uniting of theatrical and literary realms, Pascoe maintains, women writers were inspired by the most famous actress of the era, Sarah Siddons. Siddons's shrewd deployment of her private life in the construction of her public persona serves as a model for such disparate poets as Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- Introduction -- 1. Sarah Siddons and the Performative Female -- 2. The Courtroom Theater of the 1794 Treason Trials -- 3. “That fluttering, tinselled crew”: Women Poets and Della Cruscanism -- 4. Embodying Marie Antoinette: The Theatricalized Female Subject -- 5. The Spectacular Flaneuse: Women Writers and the City -- 6. Theatricality and the Literary Marketplace: Poetry Publication in the Morning Post -- 7. Performing Wordsworth -- Coda. Letitia Landon and the Deathly Pose -- Index