Restoration Drama and the Idea of Literature
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.
- Marcie Frank, Concordia University, author of The Novel Stage: Narrative Form from the Restoration to Jane AustenMannheimer is a brilliant close reader, and makes an original and substantial contribution to eighteenth-century literary studies. Her interpretive framework grows organically out of the drama itself, and the critical and historical contexts that she gracefully weaves together make this a most engaging and beautifully written book.
- Eighteenth-Century StudiesA finely crafted, carefully plotted, nuanced, and compelling case for restoring late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century theater to the debate about canon-formation, histories of mediation, the book, and print as well as performance studies and theater history.
- SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900(O)ne of the most thought-provoking monographs I have read in recent years. Mannheimer tracks how the emergence of a deeply important set of assumptions about print and performance in the late seventeenth century activated a theorization of the cultural field within drama itself.
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."
1. Of Heirs and "Bold Purloiner[s]": Shadwell's Alternative Models of Literary Inheritance in The Lancashire Withces and The Squire of Alsatia
2. "Can my Imagination feel?": Reading, Theatricality, and the Mind-Body Problem in Aphra Behn's The Lucky Chance and The Emperor of the Moon
3. Textual Timelessness, Performative Time: Posterity in Congreve's Love for Love and The Way of the World
4. "Take this sad Ballad, which I bought at Fair": Pastoral Performance and Print Capitalism in John Gay's The What D'Ye Call It and The Beggar's Opera
Conclusion
