Restoration Drama and the Idea of Literature
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€33.99
A01=Katherine Mannheimer
anonymous authorship
Aphra Behn
Author_Katherine Mannheimer
ballad form
British Interregnum
canon cormation
Category=DSBD
Category=DSG
empiricism
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Hobbes
John Dryden
John Gay
John Locke
Licensing of the Press Act
literary canon
Literary Marketplace
Margaret Cavendish
natural philosophy
orality of lower class
page and stage
parody
pastoralism
performing body
Print Culture
proprietary authorship
Shakespeare
Sophocles
Stuart monarchy
temporality
textuality
The Beggar's Opera
The Emperor of the Moon
The Way of the World
theatre ban
Thomas Shadwell
William Congreve
Product details
- ISBN 9780813950433
- Weight: 272g
- Dimensions: 156 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 28 Dec 2023
- Publisher: University of Virginia Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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From 1642 to 1660, live theater was banned in England. The market for printed books, however—including plays—flourished. How did this period, when plays could be read but not performed, affect the way drama was written thereafter? As Katherine Mannheimer demonstrates, the plays of the following decades exhibited a distinct self-consciousness of drama’s status as a singular art form that straddled both page and stage.
Scholars have commented on how the ban on live performance changed the way consumers read plays, but no previous book has addressed how this upheaval changed the way dramatists wrote them. In Restoration Drama and the Idea of Literature, Mannheimer argues that Restoration playwrights recognized and exploited the tension between print and performance inherent to all drama. By repeatedly and systematically manipulating this tension, these authors’ works sought to court the reader while at the same time also challenging emergent concepts of "literature" that privileged textuality and print culture over the performing body and the live voice.
Scholars have commented on how the ban on live performance changed the way consumers read plays, but no previous book has addressed how this upheaval changed the way dramatists wrote them. In Restoration Drama and the Idea of Literature, Mannheimer argues that Restoration playwrights recognized and exploited the tension between print and performance inherent to all drama. By repeatedly and systematically manipulating this tension, these authors’ works sought to court the reader while at the same time also challenging emergent concepts of "literature" that privileged textuality and print culture over the performing body and the live voice.
Katherine Mannheimer is Associate Professor of English at the University of Rochester and the author of Print, Visuality, and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Satire: "The Scope in Ev’ry Page."
