The complete plays of Fanny Burney, taken from the original manuscripts of her work. The work includes a general introduction, headnotes to each play, explanatory notes and variant readings.

The complete plays of Fanny Burney, taken from the original manuscripts of her work. The work includes a general introduction, headnotes to each play, explanatory notes and variant readings.

In the plays, as in her novels, Burney satirizes the social conventions and pretensions of her day. The Witlings (1779), her first play, is a biting satire on the Bluestockings; it was never performed, however, for fear of a possible scandal. The violent, the grotesque, and the macabre also figure strongly in her writings. Contents Volume 1: The Comedies Introduction Chronology The Witlings (1778-80) Love and Fashion (1798-99) A Busy Day (1800-02) The Woman-Hater (1800-02) Volume 2: The Tragedies Edwy and Elgiva (1788-95) Hubert de Vere (1790-97) The Siege of Pevensey (1790-91) Elberta (1791-1814) Appendix: The Triumphant Toadeater (1798)

The complete plays of Fanny Burney, taken from the original manuscripts of her work. The work includes a general introduction, headnotes to each play, explanatory notes and variant readings.

Feminist Comedy: Women Playwrights of London identifies the eighteenth-century comedic stage as a key site of feminist critique, practice, and experimentation. While the history of feminism and comedy is undeniably vexed, by focusing on five women playwrights of the latter half of the eighteenth century--Catherine Clive, Frances Brooke, Frances Burney, Hannah Cowley, and Elizabeth Inchbald--this book demonstrates that stage comedy was crucial to these women’s professional success in a male-dominated industry and reveals a unifying thread of feminist critique that connects their works. Though male detractors denied women’s comic ability throughout the era, eighteenth-century women playwrights were on the cutting edge of comedy and their work had important feminist influence that can be traced to today’s stages and screens.

When the novel broke into cultural prominence in the eighteenth century, it became notorious for the gripping, immersive style of its narratives. In this book, Karin Kukkonen explores this phenomenon through the embodied style in Eliza Haywood's flamboyant amatory fiction, Charlotte Lennox's work as a cultural broker between Britain and France, Sarah Fielding's experimental novels, and Frances Burney's practice of life-writing and fiction-writing. Four female authors who are often written out of the history of the genre are here foregrounded in a critical account that emphasizes the importance of engaging readers' minds and bodies, and which invites us to revisit our understanding of the rise of the modern novel. Kukkonen's innovative theoretical approach is based on the approach of 4E cognition, which views thinking as profoundly embodied and embedded in social and material contexts, extending into technologies and material devices (such as a pen), and enactive in the inherent links between perceiving the world and moving around in it. 4E Cognition and Eighteenth-Century Fiction investigates the eighteenth-century novel through each of these trajectories and shows how language explores its embodied dimension by increasing the descriptions of inner perception, or the bodily gestures around spoken dialogue. The embodied dimension is then related to the media ecologies of letter-writing, book learning, and theatricality. As the novel feeds off and into these social and material contexts, it comes into its own as a lifeworld technology that might not answer to standards of nineteenth-century realism but that feels 'real' because it is integrated into the lifeworld and embodied experiences. 4E cognition answers one of the central challenges to cognitive literary studies: how to integrate historical and cultural contexts into cognitive approaches.

First published in 2000, this collection of essays focuses on women theatre artists in the romantic period.