Overview

Less than twenty years after asserting global dominance in the Seven Years' War, Britain suffered a devastating defeat when it lost the American colonies. Daniel O'Quinn explores how the theaters and the newspapers worked in concert to mediate the events of the American war for British audiences and how these convergent media attempted to articulate a post-American future for British imperial society. Building on the methodological innovations of his 2005 publication Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770-1800, O'Quinn demonstrates how the reconstitution of British imperial subjectivities involved an almost nightly engagement with a rich entertainment culture that necessarily incorporated information circulated in the daily press. Each chapter investigates different moments in the American crisis through the analysis of scenes of social and theatrical performance and through careful readings of works by figures such as Richard Brinsley Sheridan, William Cowper, Hannah More, Arthur Murphy, Hannah Cowley, George Colman, and Georg Friedrich Handel. Through a close engagement with this diverse entertainment archive, O'Quinn traces the hollowing out of elite British masculinity during the 1770s and examines the resulting strategies for reconfiguring ideas of gender, sexuality, and sociability that would stabilize national and imperial relations in the 1780s. Together, O'Quinn's two books offer a dramatic account of the global shifts in British imperial culture that will be of interest to scholars in theater and performance studies, eighteenth-century studies, Romanticism, and trans-Atlantic studies.

Full Product Details

Author:   Daniel O'Quinn (Associate Professor, University of Guelph)
Publisher:   Johns Hopkins University Press
Imprint:   Johns Hopkins University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 2.90cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.703kg
ISBN:  

9780801899317

ISBN 10:   0801899311
Pages:   440
Publication Date:   10 July 2011
Recommended Age:   From 17
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   To order  
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Table of Contents

"Acknowledgments Introduction: Entertainment, Mediation, and the Future of Empire I. Diversions 1. The Agents of Mars and the Temples of Venus: John Burgoyne's Remediated Pleasures 2. Out to America: Performance and the Politics of Mediated Space II. Regime Change 3. To Rise in Greater Splendor: John André's Errant Knights 4. ""The body"" of David Garrick: Richard Brinsley Sheridan, America, and the Ends of Theatre III. Celebrations 5. Which Is the Man? Remediation, Interruption, and the Celebration of Martial Masculinity 6. Days and Nights of the Living Dead: Handelmania Coda: ""In praise of the oak, its advantage and prosperity"" Notes Index"

Reviews

<p>The result of reading such an intense and lengthy study is a feeling of great satisfaction.--Elizabeth Fay Wordsworth Circle (01/01/2011)

Author Information

Daniel O'Quinn is a professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph, Ontario, and author of Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770-1800, also published by Johns Hopkins. He is also coeditor of the Cambridge Companion to British Theater, 1730-1830 and editor of Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan.

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