"Many nineteenth-century writers believed that the best tragedy should be read rather than performed, and they have often been attacked for their views by later critics. Through detailed analysis of Coleridge's Shakespearean Criticism, Lamb's On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, and Hazlitt's Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, Heller shows that in their concern with educating the reader these Romantics anticipate twentieth-century reader response criticism, educational theory, and film criticism."--Publishers website.

Reading Drama in Eighteenth-Century France is the first book-length study of how plays were read in eighteenth-century France and, relatedly, of closet drama: excessive plays that cannot be performed within the playhouse's confines and which thus appeal to the reader's imagination. This period in France was characterized by 'théâtromanie', a craze that encompassed the page as well as the stage. The book's first part surveys the historical context in which plays were read and offers a theoretical model for understanding this practice. The eighteenth-century closet was valued as a privileged site of reading. Although scholars routinely present this room as a place of calm reflection, Thomas Wynn develops a framework (derived in part from queer theory) to argue that it fosters passionate and disruptive pleasures that elude the coercive normativity of the playhouse. To explore the multipositional experience of reading plays in this period, Wynn turns to the journal Mercure de France, whose extensive reviews help us to think about geographies of reading, coercion, and autonomy. The second part examines how dramatists exploited the critical, imaginative, and formal potential of the reading experience. It offers close analysis of several closet plays: comedies depicting the dispute between Jesuits and Jansenists in the 1730s; Hénault's historical drama François II, roi de France (1747); and erotic plays from the end of the period. The study concludes with an account of Rétif de La Bretonne's Le Drame de la vie (1793)—an extreme and arguably unsurpassed example of closet drama. Ultimately, this book shows, closet drama is not failed theatre but rather an indisputable part of the lively, passionate, and combative theatrical culture of eighteenth-century France.

Re-Reading The Excursion: Narrative, Response and the Wordsworthian Dramatic Voice is a groundbreaking study, which transforms contemporary critical understanding of The Excursion and of the place of this long poem in the Wordsworthian canon. Sally Bushell argues that the poem, which has suffered at the hands of critics for most of the twentieth century, has been unfairly judged according to a Coleridgean rather than a Wordsworthian definition of "philosophy"-that it has been read as a didactic work, rather than one which uses its dramatic form to teach its readers to think for themselves. She offers a new reading in which The Excursion is shown to be about providing the readers with moral habits and mental constructs by which to learn, not simply telling them what to think. The book begins with a discussion of the reception of the poem in 1814, considering the responses of Coleridge, Hazlitt, Francis Jeffrey and Charles Lamb. This historicized discussion is then balanced by a reading of the poem at the compositional stage, looking at the emergence from the manuscripts of a Wordsworthian dramatic voice. The author goes on to argue that the poem's philosophy is performative-that is, concerned with the way in which moral ideas can best be communicated, as much as with the ideas themselves. She then shifts her attention to consider how this operates in relation to the reader, considering the importance of context in relation to emotional response. Later, the epitaphic books are reconsidered in the light of Wordworth's critical writing; Bushell argues that the significance of the epitaph for him lies in its values as a poetic form in which the text itself is released from poetic authority. Finally, the author looks back at The Prelude from the perspective of The Excursion and shows how the later poem attempts to value the ordinary, rather than the poetic, mind. The conclusion reached is that Wordsworth is not just the "egotistical" poet of The Prelude, interested largely in the development of his own imaginative powers, but one who goes on to explore the limits of subjectivity and the importance of different kinds of imaginative links between individuals.

The second set of volumes in the eighteen-volume series Great Shakespeareans, covering the work of nineteen key figures who influenced the global understanding of Shakespeare

Great Shakespeareans offers a systematic account of those figures who have had the greatest influence on the interpretation, understanding and cultural reception of Shakespeare, both nationally and internationally. This major project offers an unprecedented scholarly analysis of the contribution made by the most important Shakespearean critics, editors, actors and directors as well as novelists, poets, composers, and thinkers from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Great Shakespeareans will be an essential resource for students and scholars in Shakespeare studies.

This unique anthology presents the important historical essays on tragedy, ranging from antiquity to the present, divided into historical periods and arranged chronologically. Across its span, it traces the development of theories and philosophies of tragedy, enabling readers to consider the ways in which different varieties of environmentalist, feminist, leftist and postcolonial thought have transformed the status of tragedy, and the idea of the tragic, for recent generations of artists, critics and thinkers. Students of literature and theatre will find this collection an invaluable and accessible guide to writing from Plato and Aristotle through to Freud, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and 21st century theorists. Ideas of tragedy and the tragic have been central to the understanding of culture for the past two millennia. Writers and thinkers from Plato through to Martha Nussbaum have analyzed the genre of tragedy to probe the most fundamental of questions about ethics, pleasure and responsibility in the world. Does tragedy demand that we enjoy witnessing the pain of others? Does it suggest that suffering is inevitable? Is human sexuality tragic? Is tragedy even possible in a world of rolling news on a digitally connected planet, where atrocity and trauma from around the globe are matters of daily information? In order to illustrate the different ways that writers have approached the answers to such questions, this Reader collects together a comprehensive selection of canonical writings on tragedy from antiquity to the present day arranged in six sections, each featuring an introduction providing concise and informed historical and theoretical frameworks for the texts.