Appropriating the Restoration hero(ine): intertextuality and the transformation of gender identity, 1677-1759

Adaption;Eighteenth-Century;British literature;Restoration drama;novels

Holguin, Marilyn M

关键词: Adaption;    Eighteenth-Century;    British literature;    Restoration drama;    novels;   

Others  :  https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/90785/HOLGUIN-DISSERTATION-2016.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

美国|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

My dissertation considers how and why representations of female suffering in Restoration tragedy had a profound impact on the development of mid-eighteenth century novels and plays, focusing primarily on the work of Aphra Behn, Thomas Southerne, John Dryden, Samuel Richardson and David Garrick. Previous scholarship on Restoration "she-tragedies" has tended to emphasize how their heroines’ descent into hysteria, madness, and death implies a total loss of female agency and power.My project challenges this reigning interpretation: through detailed readings of Richardson’s and Garrick's adaptations of Restoration tragedy, I argue that these influential mid-century authors transform the spectacle of female suffering into a resource for female empowerment and authority over the public sphere. My four chapters analyze Restoration tragic female characters as strongly influencing eighteenth-century writers, who appropriated and adapted them in relation to changing cultural tastes, especially as regards more restricted representations of female sexuality and the heightened desire to promote a seemingly less complex version of female virtue. Scholarship in the long eighteenth-century has suffered from a tendency to emphasize distinctions between the "licentious" culture of the Restoration and the “reformed” tastes of mid-eighteenth-century readers and audiences; by allowing these two cultural moments to speak to one another, my project challenges those distinctions and considers the more nuanced ways mid-eighteenth century’s writers like Richardson and Garrick were informed and influenced by Restoration drama.