Women and Playwriting in Nineteenth-Century Britain

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Tracy C. Davis, Ellen Donkin
Cambridge University Press, May 27, 1999 - Drama - 295 pages
This collection of essays, written by a team of leading scholars in the field, undertakes not simply to recover the names and careers of women playwrights but to call into question the whole idea of what a playwright is, and what she does, and why it matters. Gender inquiry is the start: destabilising the category of playwrights loosens the borders of theatre history making it possible to reconceptualize theatre and drama not as a product of culture but as social processes dynamically interacting with culture.

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Contents

The sociable playwright and representative citizen
15
To be public as a genius and private as a woman The critical framing of nineteenthcentury British women playwrights
35
Mrs Gore gives tit for tat
54
Wrighting the play
75
Jane Scott the writermanager
77
Illusions of authorship
99
Sarah Lane questions of authorship
125
Geographies of production
149
From a female pen The proper lady as playwright in the West End theatre 18231844
193
Genre trouble
213
Genre trouble Joanna Baillie Elizabeth Polack tragic subjects melodramatic subjects
215
Sappho in the closet
233
Conflicted politics and circumspect comedy Womens comic playwriting in the 1890s
256
Plays cited in this volume
277
Plays by women dramatists in East End theatres 1860s1880s
282
Index
286

Staging the state Joanna Baillies Constantine Paleologus
151
The lady playwrights and the wild tribes of the East Female dramatists in the East End theatres 18601880
174

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