A Race Of Female Patriots: Women and Public Spirit on the British Stage, 1688-1745

by Brett Wilson

Overview

A Race of Female Patriots argues that public-spirited women proliferated on the eighteenth-century British stage to catalyze an affective experience of political belonging, as dramatists imagined new forms of affiliation, allegiance, and loyalty suitable to the new British constitution established bythe Glorious Revolution of 1688. Brett D. Wilson examines both staples of the repertory (The Fair Penitent, Jane Shore) and lesser-known plays (Liberty Asserted, The Revolution of Sweden, Edward and Eleonora) to define the parameters of a prevalent yet under-examined dramatic mode: “civic” dramas that use scenes of political strife and private distress to stage the fashioning of communities around women. Onstage, women act to benefit the public—crucially, Wilson argues, by infusing the commonwealth with sentimental ardor: public spirit. Playwrights like Nicholas Rowe, Catharine Trotter, John Dennis, and James Thomson make the female-centered unions they imagine into synecdoches for a British nation transformed from turmoil to harmony. Restoring to view key neglected texts that portray women who feel deeply as agents of inclusion and icons of civic virtue, A Race of Female Patriots is a persuasive study of tragic drama at a time of great political change that yields new insight into the relation between women, feeling, and the public sphere.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611483659
Publisher:	University Press Copublishing Division
Publication date:	12/23/2011
Series:	Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650-1850
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	316
File size:	646 KB

About the Author

Brett D. Wilson is associate professor of English at the College of William & Mary. His articles on sympathy and national feeling in eighteenth-century British drama have appeared in ELH and Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Table of Contents

Preface.
Introduction.
“A female patriot? Vanity! Absurd!”
Chapter 1.
“How Hard Is the Condition of Our Sex”:The Female Advocate and the Subject of Sympathy in The Fair Penitent
Chapter 2.
That Sex's Care:Sentimental Union and the Common Good
Chapter 3.
Public Victims:Janes, Jacobites, and the National She-Tragedy
Chapter 4.
“Even in the Softer Sex”:Gendering Patriotism in the Plays of James Thomson
Epilogue.
Circulating Power, Public Affections, and the Re-masculinization of British Public Spirit
Works Cited

Editorial Reviews

A Race of Female Patriots is fine study of a select number of political dramas in the first half of the eighteenth century. ... Wilson has given us a provocative study of eighteenth-century tragedies. His analysis expands our understanding of the impact of revolutionary rhetoric beyond the more familiar political essays and disputes of the first half of the eighteenth century.

Modern Philology

The strength of the book lies in the way it provides a new sense of the cultural logic of these texts considered generically as exemplars of a specifically Whig ideology.

American Behavioral Scientist