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32265
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Lecture-Discussion
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E
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1:00PM
-2:50PM
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W
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113 English Building
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Markley, R
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- Part of Term:
- 1
- Date Range:
- 01/19/16-05/04/16
- Section Title:
- British Drama 1650-1820
- Section Info:
- Topic Section E: The Cosmopolitan Stage: British Drama 1650-1820 As the dominant mode of public entertainment between 1660 and 1800, the London theater played a critical role in the literature and culture of Britain during the long eighteenth century. To a far greater extent than the domestic novel, the popular stage registered Britain’s changing role in a globalized economy, helping to reshape what we now think of as “modern” national, racial and gender identities. Dozens of well-received plays performed in the period were set in Asia or the Americas, and—in their quest for commercial and critical success—dramatists explored a range of hot-button issues including slavery and the slave trade, the succession crisis of the early 1680s, the colonization of the Americas, and the fate of women trapped in loveless or abusive marriages. As a result, the drama of the period has become an important site for feminist and postcolonial critics who have challenged the assumptions that governed traditional accounts of British drama. Before the 1720s, British drama (and literature more generally) faced eastward to Asia rather than to the colonies in North America. Highly successful plays were set in the Morocco, China, Persia, the Mughal Empire, Islamic Spain, and Southeast and Central Asia. These plays tended to emphasize the similarities—in terms of race, nobility, and gender norms—between the upper-classes in Britain and their aristocratic counterparts in a variety of Asian (and South American) empires. In these works, we will be able to explore the complex development of British attitudes toward race, colonialism, and empire when Great Britain was still a regional rather than world power. The more overtly imperial, colonialist and racist drama of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in part, might be seen as a reaction against the cosmopolitan values, assumptions, and complexities of drama between roughly 1660 and 1710. To explore the cosmopolitan stage of the long eighteenth century, this seminar will analyze a range of successful plays that explore the gendered, racialized, and politico-religious problems of empire, trade, and colonialism. We will read and discuss plays by John Dryden, Elkanah Settle, George Etherege, Aphra Behn, Thomas Southerne, Delariviere Manley, William Wycherley, Susannah Centlivre, Thomas Shadwell, Catherine Trotter, William Congreve, Hannah More, and Richard Cumberland, among others. In addition to several short response papers, students will write a seminar paper on topics of their choosing. There also will be opportunities to do archival work in the Library’s world-class collection of plays by women, notably Aphra Behn, and to investigate attitudes toward race, gender, non-Christian religions, and slavery in primary texts concerned with colonization, the East India trade, and the slave trade.
- Restriction(s):
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Restricted to Graduate - Urbana-Champaign.
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