This 2001 book examines how Romantic women performers and playwrights used theatrical conventions to intervene in politics.

67 texts, including hymns, manifestos, articles or extracts from lengthy studies exemplify the relation between Romanticism and the national movements in the cultural space ranging from Poland to the Ottoman Empire. Each text is accompanied by a presentation of the author, and by an analysis of the context in which the respective work was born.The end of the 18th century and first decades of the 19th were in many respects a watershed period in European history. The ideas of the Enlightenment and the dramatic convulsions of the French Revolution had shattered the old bonds and cast doubt upon the established moral and social norms of the old corporate society. In culture a new trend, Romanticism, was successfully asserting itself against Classicism and provided a new key for a growing number of activists to 're-imagine' their national community, reaching beyond the traditional frameworks of identification (such as the 'political nation', regional patriotism, or Christian universalism). The collection focuses on the interplay of Romantic cultural discourses and the shaping of national ideology throughout the 19th century, tracing the patterns of cultural transfer with Western Europe as well as the mimetic competition of national ideologies within the region.

The "(re)turn to history" in Romantic Studies in the 1980s marked the beginning of a critical orthodoxy that continues to condition, if not define, our sense of the Romantic period twenty-five years on. Romantic New Historicism’s revisionary engagements have played a central role in the realignment of the field and in the expansion of the Romantic canon. In this major new collection of eleven essays, critics reflect on New Historicism’s inheritance, its achievements and its limitations. Integrating a self-reflexive engagement with New Historicism’s "history" and detailed attention to a range of Romantic lives and literary texts, the collection offers a close-up view of Romanticism’s hybrid present, and a dynamic vision of its future.

Throughout her works, Mary Wollstonecraft interrogates and represents the connected network of theater, culture, and self-representation, in what Lisa Plummer Crafton argues is a conscious appropriation of theater in its literal, cultural, and figurative dimensions. Situating Wollstonecraft within early Romantic debates about theatricality, she explores Wollstonecraft's appropriation of, immersion in, and contributions to these debates within the contexts of philosophical arguments about the utility of theater and spectacle; the political discourse of the French Revolution; juridical transcripts of treason and civil divorce trials; and the spectacle of the female actress in performance, as typified by Sarah Siddons and her compelling connections to Wollstonecraft on and off stage. As she considers Wollstonecraft's contributions to competing notions of the theatrical, from the writer's earliest literary reviews and translations through her histories, correspondence, nonfiction, and novels, Crafton traces the trajectory of Wollstonecraft's conscious appropriation of the trope and her emphasis on theatricality's transgressive potential for self-invention. Crafton's book, the first wide-ranging study of theatricality in the works of Wollstonecraft, is an important contribution to current reconsiderations of the earlier received wisdom about Romantic anti-theatricality, to historicist revisions of the performance and theory of Sarah Siddons, and to theories of spectacle and gender.

Die europäische Romantik war nicht nur heterogen und intern zerstritten. Sie hatte sich auch gegen Aufklärung und Klassizismus zu verteidigen, welche um die Zeit der Französischen Revolution weiterlebten. Klassizisten betrachteten die Romantik als Anhäufung abtrünniger »neuer Schulen«, die das Monopol der Classical Tradition bedrohten. Die erbitterten Debatten in Ästhetik und Politik wurden auf beiden Seiten mit den überkommenen Strategien der klassischen »ars disputandi« geführt. Unter schwerstem satirischem Beschuss begann die Romantik, sich als eine Bewegung zu begreifen, und es entstand der problematische Gegensatz von »klassisch« und »romantisch«. Diese Konstruktion war aber unverzichtbar, um die Fronten im Wirrwarr der Stimmen zu klären, und blieb es auch in der Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft, die auf solche Subsumptionen nicht verzichten kann. Die Classical Tradition, die das Christentum einschließt, erweist sich als ein laufender Prozess von der Antike bis heute.

Hannah Cowley (1743–1809) was a very successful dramatist, and something of an eighteenth-century celebrity. New critical interest in the drama of this period has meant a resurgence of interest in Cowley’s writing and in the performance of her plays. This is the first substantial monograph study to examine Cowley’s life and work.

A revelatory history of the characters that playwrights and managers created out of the real lives of women in intimate relationships with military men to serve Great Britain's greatest needs during the war-saturated eighteenth century. During the long eighteenth century, Great Britain was almost continuously at war. As the era unfolded, the theatre gradually discovered the potential in having actresses, recently introduced to the stage in the 1660s, perform as wartime women characters. As playwrights and managers began casting women in transformative roles to meet each major national need, female characters came to be central figures in bringing the war home to the nation, transforming them into deeply patriotic British subjects. Paula Backscheider's Women in Wartime is the first study of theatrical representations of women with intimate connections to military men. Drawing upon her extensive expertise in gender, performance studies, popular culture, and archival studies, Backscheider traces the rise of the London theatre's acceptance that one of its responsibilities was to support its country's wars. Rather than focusing on the historical, mythical "warrior women" on the battlefield who have been much studied, Backscheider explores the lives and work of sweethearts, wives, mothers, sisters, barmaids, provision sellers, seaport prostitutes, and more, whose relationships to active-duty men made them recruits, volunteers, or even conscripts. They represent a distinct group of thousands of real women, and the actresses who portrayed them gave performances of change, struggle, celebration, mourning, survival, love, and patriotism. Backscheider explicates more than fifty plays—from main pieces, short farces, interludes, afterpieces, and comic operas to entr'actes, pantomimes, and even masques—as both entertainment and as ideological and propagandistic vehicles in times of severe crises. She also reveals how these works, many written by men with military experience, attest to the context of difficult, inescapable realities and momentous needs. Through the debunking of sexual stereotypes and attention to audience-pleasing roles such as impoverished-wife and breeches parts, Backscheider adds a dimension to theatrical history that substantially contributes to women's and military histories. Women in Wartime demonstrates the startling acuity and prescience of the repertoire in responding to the war-steeped culture of the period.