This extraordinary edition includes seven full-length plays from the era, including an unproduced play by Frances Burney, unavailable for centuries. Women playwrights of the Restoration and eighteenth century were bawdy and proper, apologetic and defiant, often derided and occasionally praised. The seven women represented in this groundbreaking anthology—the only collection of Restoration and eighteenth-century plays devoted exclusively to women—had but one thing in common: the desire to ignore convention and write for the stage. In 1660, when theatres in England reopened after years of Puritan repression, women trod the boards as actors for the very first time. By the end of the century they had stormed and breached another bastion of the male domain and become dramatists as well. Most available collections of plays from the period exclude them; traditional criticism overlooks or diminishes them. But their works, as seen here, hold their own against the most popular productions for the theater from 1678 to 1787, and do it with a distinctively female spirit. Each of these women—Aphra Behn, Frances Burney, Susanna Centlivre, Hannah Cowley, Elizabeth Inchbald, Mary Griffith Pix, and Mercy Otis Warren—legitimized the profession of playwright for their sex. They were the genre's prolific women pioneers whose body of work has remained unmatched until the twentieth century.

This six-volume anthology documents the history of women's drama throughout the 18th century, starting with the emergence in 1695-6 of the second generation of women dramatists to Aphra Benn. It includes the work of Catherine Trotter, Mary Pix, Eliza Haywood and Elizabeth Griffith.

A comprehensive survey of women's drama between the Renaissance and the end of the eighteenth century, assessing the plays' characteristic features and the ruptures in the text indicating the writers' precarious social and artistic position and ambiguous stances to their own creativity and sex. Chapters are devoted to individual writers as well as to general developments in specific periods. The most significant plays are analysed in detail and related to the male literary canon of the time in order to stress both their originality and the existence of an, albeit tentative, female literary tradition.

The exuberant recovery from obscurity of scores of British women writers has prompted professors and publishers to revisit publication of women's writings. New curricular inclusion of these sometimes quirky, often passionate writers profoundly disrupts traditional pedagogical assumptions about what constitutes «literature». This book addresses this radically changed educational landscape, offering practical, proven teaching strategies for newly «recovered» writers, both in special-topics courses and in traditional teaching environments. Moreover, it addresses the institutional issues confronting feminist scholars who teach women writers in a variety of settings and the kinds of career-altering effects the decision to teach this material can have on junior and senior scholars alike. Collectively, these essays argue that teaching noncanonical women writers invigorates the curriculum as a whole, not only by introducing the voices of women writers, but by incorporating new genres, by asking new questions about readers' assumptions and aesthetic values, and by altering the power relations between teacher and student for the better.

Representing the largest expansion between editions, this updated volume of Ottemiller's Index to Plays in Collections is the standard location tool for full-length plays published in collections and anthologies in England and the United States throughout the 20th century and beyond. This new volume lists more than 3,500 new plays and 2,000 new authors, as well as birth and/or death information for hundreds of authors.

As theatre and drama of the Romantic Period undergo a critical reassessment among scholars internationally, the contributions of women as playwrights, actresses, and managers are also being revalued. This volume, which brings together leading British, North American, and Italian critics, is a crucial step towards reclaiming the importance of women's dramatic and theatrical activities during the period. Writing for the theatre implied assuming a public role, a hazardous undertaking for women who, especially after the French Revolution, were assigned to the private, primarily domestic, sphere. As the contributors examine the covert strategies women used to become full participants in the public theatre, they shed light on the issue of women's agency, expressed both through the writing of highly politicized or ethicized drama, as in the case of Elizabeth Inchbald or Joanna Baillie, and through women's professional practice as theatre managers and stage producers, as in the case of Elizabeth Vestris and Jane Scott. Among the topics considered are women's history plays, domesticity, ethics and sexuality in women's closet drama, the politics of drama and performance, and the role of women as managers and producers. Specialists in performance studies, Romantic Period drama, and women's writing will find the essays both challenging and inspiring.

"Saggini traces the unique interplay between fiction and theatre in the eighteenth century through an examination of the work of the English novelist, diarist, and playwright Frances Burney" -- Dust jacket.