Closet Stages : Joanna Baillie and the Theater Theory of British Romantic Women Writers

Catherine Burroughs reveals how a concern with the performative aspects of daily life and the movement between public and private spheres produced a notion of theater that complicates the Romantic opposition between "closet" and "stage." Catherine Burroughs reveals how a concern with the performative aspects of daily life and the movement between public and private spheres produced a notion of theater that complicates the Romantic opposition between "closet" and "stage." Contents Preface 1. "The Value of Our Criticism": Constructing Women's Theater Theory 2. Representing the Female Actor: Celebrity Narratives, Women's Theories of Acting, and Social Theaters 3. Joanna Baillie's Theater of the Closet: Female Romantic Playwrights and Preface Writing 4. Conflicted Performance Styles in Baillie's First Volume of Plays on the Passions (1798) 5. Private Theatricals and Baillie's The Tryal Appendix: Selected List of Texts Containing Women's Theater Theory Published in Great Britain (1790–1850) Notes Works Cited Index A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z Closet Stages examines theater theory produced by middle- and upper-class British women-playwrights, actresses, and spectators-between 1790 and 1840. Shifting the focus away from the Romantic male writers to the journals, letters, and play prefaces in which women framed their relationship to the theater arts, Catherine Burroughs reveals how a concern with the performative aspects of daily life and the movement between public and private spheres produced a notion of theater that complicates the Romantic opposition between "closet" and "stage."