The Rivals and Polly Honeycombe revolve around young women who wish the world would conform to novelistic convention. Unlike most eighteenth-century heroines keen on novel reading, however, Lydia Languish and Polly Honeycombe are neither deluded nor in any real danger. Rather, they inhabit a world in which everyone is engaged in some sort of quixotic performance; the more appealing characters are just willing to admit it. Both farcical and wise, these plays teasingly celebrate the perennial appeal of fiction, while never letting us forget how much it relies upon the everyday rituals of performance. The introduction to this Broadview edition explores the interrelations between print and performance in the eighteenth century, including a detailed and well-illustrated account of what it was like to go to the theater. Appendices include material on the original casts, the often dubious reputation of novel reading and circulating libraries, Sheridan’s high-profile elopement with Elizabeth Linley (which made him a celebrity before he ever staged a word), and the narrative possibilities conjured up by setting The Rivals in the resort city of Bath.

Shortlisted for the 2021 BARS First Book Prize (British Association for Romantic Studies)​ The Printed Reader explores the transformative power of reading in the eighteenth century, and how this was expressed in the fascination with Don Quixote and in a proliferation of narratives about quixotic readers, readers who attempt to reproduce and embody their readings. Through intersecting readings of quixotic narratives, including work by Charlotte Lennox, Laurence Sterne, George Colman, Richard Graves, and Elizabeth Hamilton, Amelia Dale argues that literature was envisaged as imprinting—most crucially, in gendered terms—the reader’s mind, character, and body. The Printed Reader brings together key debates concerning quixotic narratives, print culture, sensibility, empiricism, book history, and the material text, connecting developments in print technology to gendered conceptualizations of quixotism. Tracing the meanings of quixotic readers’ bodies, The Printed Reader claims the social and political text that is the quixotic reader is structured by the experiential, affective, and sexual resonances of imprinting and impressions. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

This book explores ways in which passions came to be conceived, performed and authenticated in the eighteenth-century marketplace of print. It considers satire and sympathy in various environments, ranging from popular novels and journalism, through philosophical studies of the Scottish Enlightenment, to last words, aesthetics, and plastic surgery.

This series presents a comprehensive, global and up-to-date history of English-language prose fiction and written ... by a international team of scholars ... -- dust jacket.

"The Novel Stage: Narrative Form from the Restoration to Jane Austen traces the novel's relation to the theater over the course of the long eighteenth century, arguing that the familiar account of the novel as 'new' and distinct from other literary genres risks distorting a true reckoning of the form by failing to engage with the borrowings and departures from other more familiar genres, particularly drama. The Novel Stage traces the migration of tragicomedy, the comedy of manners, and melodrama from the stage to the novel. These genres were shared across print and performance, media that were not construed as opposites in a world in which individual silent reading took place beside playgoing, play-reading, amateur theatricals, and sociable reading aloud. The book thus expands an overly narrow conception of the novel as the genre of realism or domesticity whose highest achievement is its representation of characters' mental lives by describing the influence of the stage and its genres. Beginning in the later 1600s with Aphra Behn, The Novel Stage concludes with a chapter on some novelists of the Romantic period and a coda about Victorian novels. The Novel Stage's account of the novel provides an enriched, because more specific, sense of its formal accomplishments that drew on this ensemble of cultural forms and turns that lens back onto drama"--Provided by publisher.

An absorbing study of the contested embodiment of the idea of presence in the plays and novels of the eighteenth century.

Theatre in Dublin,1745–1820: A Calendar of Performances is the first comprehensive, daily compendium of more than 18,000 performances that took place in Dublin’s many professional theatres, music halls, pleasure gardens, and circus amphitheatres between Thomas Sheridan’s becoming the manager at Smock Alley Theatre in 1745 and the dissolution of the Crow Street Theatre in 1820. The daily performance calendar for each of the seventy-five seasons recorded here records and organizes all surviving documentary evidence pertinent to each evening’s entertainments, derived from all known sources, but especially from playbills and newspaper advertisements. Each theatre’s daily entry includes all preludes, mainpieces, interludes, and afterpieces with casts and assigned roles, followed by singing and singers, dancing and dancers, and specialty entertainments. Financial data, program changes, rehearsal notices, authorship and premiere information are included in each component’s entry, as is the text of contemporary correspondence and editorial contextualization and commentary, followed by other additional commentary, such as the many hundreds of printed puffs, notices, and performance reviews. In the cases of the programs of music halls, pleasure gardens, and circuses, the playbills have generally been transcribed verbatim. The calendar for each season is preceded by an analytical headnote that presents several categories of information including, among other things, an alphabetical listing of all members of each company, whether actors, musicians, specialty artists, or house servants, who are known to have been employed at each venue. Limited biographical commentary is included, particularly about performers of Irish origin, who had significant stage careers but who did not perform in London. Each headnote presents the seasons’s offerings of entertainments of each theatrical type (prelude, mainpiece, interlude, afterpiece) analyzed according to genre, including a list of the number of plays in each genre and according to period in which they were first performed. The headnote also notes the number of different plays by Shakespeare staged during each season and gives particular attention to entertainments of “special Irish interest.” The various kinds of benefit performance and command performances are also noted. Finally, this Calendar of Performances contains an appendix that furnishes a season-by-season listing of the plays that were new to the London patent theatres, and, later, of the important “minors.” This information is provided in order for us to understand the interrelatedness of the London and Dublin repertories.