This book explores shifting representations and receptions of the arms-bearing woman on the British stage during a period in which she comes to stand in Britain as a striking symbol of revolutionary chaos. The book makes a case for viewing the British Romantic theatre as an arena in which the significance of the armed woman is constantly remodelled and reappropriated to fulfil diverse ideological functions. Used to challenge as well as to enforce established notions of sex and gender difference, she is fashioned also as an allegorical tool, serving both to condemn and to champion political and social rebellion at home and abroad. Magnifying heroines who appear on stage wielding pistols, brandishing daggers, thrusting swords, and even firing explosives, the study spotlights the intricate and often surprising ways in which the stage amazon interacts with Anglo-French, Anglo-Irish, Anglo-German, and Anglo-Spanish debates at varying moments across the French revolutionary and Napoleonic campaigns. At the same time, it foregrounds the extent to which new dramatic genres imported from Europe –notably, the German Sturm und Drang and the French-derived melodrama– facilitate possibilities at the turn of the nineteenth century for a refashioned female warrior, whose degree of agency, destructiveness, and heroism surpasses that of her tragic and sentimental predecessors.

Celebrity Across the Channel, 1750-1850 is the first book to study and compare the concept of celebrity in France and Britain from 1750 to 1850 as the two countries transformed into the states we recognize today. It offers a transnational perspective by placing in dialogue the growing fields of celebrity studies in the two countries, especially by engaging with Antoine Lilti’s seminal work, The Invention of Celebrity, translated into English in 2017. With contributions from a diverse range of scholarly cultures, the volume has a firmly interdisciplinary scope over the time period 1750 to 1850, which was an era marked by social, political, and cultural upheaval. Bringing together the fields of history, politics, literature, theater studies, and musicology, the volume employs a firmly interdisciplinary scope to explore an era marked by social, political, and cultural upheaval. The organization of the collection allows for new readings of the similarities and differences in the understanding of celebrity in Britain and France. Consequently, the volume builds upon the questions that are currently at the heart of celebrity studies.

The French Revolution brings to mind violent mobs, the guillotine, and Madame Defarge, but it was also a publishing revolution. Douthwaite explores how the works within this corpus announced the new shapes of literature to come and reveals that vestiges of these stories can be found in novels by the likes of Mary Shelley.