Cambridge University Press
9780521867320 - Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London - by Gillian Russell
Frontmatter/Prelims

WOMEN, SOCIABILITY AND THEATRE IN GEORGIAN LONDON

Mid-eighteenth-century London witnessed a major expansion in public culture as a result of a rapidly commercializing society. Of the many new sites of entertainment, the most celebrated (and often notorious) were the Carlisle House and Pantheon assembly rooms, and the Ladies Club or Coterie. In the first major study of these institutions and the fashionable sociability they epitomized, Gillian Russell examines how they transformed metropolitan cultural life. Associated with lavish masquerades, excesses of fashion such as elaborate hairstyles, and scandalous intrigues, these venues suggested a feminization of public life which was profoundly threatening, not least to the theatre of the period. In this highly illustrated and original contribution to the cultural history of the eighteenth century, Russell reveals new perspectives on the theatre and on canonicals plays such as The School for Scandal, as well as suggesting a pre-history for British Romanticism.

GILLIAN RUSSELL is Reader in English at the Australian National University. She is co-editor, with Clara Tuite, of Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain, 1770–1840 (Cambridge, 2002).

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM

General editors
Professor Marilyn Butler, University of Oxford
Professor James Chandler, University of Chicago

Editorial board
John Barrell, University of York
Paul Hamilton, University of London
Mary Jacobus, University of Cambridge
Kenneth Johnston, Indiana University
Alan Liu, University of California, Santa Barbara
Jerome McGann, University of Virginia
David Simpson, University of California, Davis

This series aims to foster the best new work in one of the most challenging fields within English literary studies. From the early 1780s to the early 1830s a formidable array of talented men and women took to literary composition, not just in poetry, which some of them famously transformed, but in many modes of writing. The expansion of publishing created new opportunities for writers, and the political stakes of what they wrote were raised again by what Wordsworth called those ‘great national events’ that were ‘almost daily taking place’: the French Revolution, the Napoleonic and American wars, urbanization, industrialization, religious revival, an expanded empire abroad and the reform movement at home. This was an enormous ambition, even when it pretended otherwise. The relations between science, philosophy, religion and literature were reworked in texts such as Frankenstein and Biographia Literaria: gender relations in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Don Juan: journalism by Cobbett and Hazlitt: poetic form, content and style by the Lake School and the Cockney School. Outside Shakespeare studies, probably no body of writing has produced such a wealth of response or done so much to shape the responses of modern criticism. This indeed is the period that saw the emergence of those notions of ‘literature’ and of literary history, especially national literary history, on which modern scholarship in English has been founded.

The categories produced by Romanticism have also been challenged by recent historicist arguments. The task of the series is to engage both with a challenging corpus of Romantic writings and with the changing field of criticism they have helped to shape. As with other literary series published by Cambridge, this one will represent the work of both younger and more established scholars, on either side of the Atlantic and elsewhere.

For a complete list of titles published see end of book.

WOMEN, SOCIABILITY AND THEATRE IN GEORGIAN LONDON

GILLIAN RUSSELL

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Cambridge University Press
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Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

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© Gillian Russell 2007

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the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2007

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-0-521-86732-0 hardback

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