This superb collection of new essays offers a unique insight into the work of a leading women dramatist of the Romantic era. Contributors offer: *contextual material for those new to Baillie's work *examinations of the relationships between her plays and the philosophical and scientific writing of the era *discussion of Baillie's theatrical methods *extended interpretations of individual plays. Ending years of neglect of Baillie's crucial work, this volume is essential reading for those working on Romanticism, women's writing, or drama of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

A peer-reviewed journal of theatre history and scholarship published annually since 1981 by the Mid-America Theatre Conference Introduction —LISA JACKSON-SCHEBETTA, WITH ODAI JOHNSON, CHRYSTYNA DAIL, AND JONATHAN SHANDELL PART I STUDIES IN THEATRE HISTORY Un-Reading Voltaire: The Ghost in the Cupboard of the House of Reason —ODAI JOHNSON Caricatured, Marginalized, and Erased: African American Artists and Philadelphia’s Negro Unit of the FTP, 1936–1939 —JONATHAN SHANDELL Stop Your Sobbing: White Fragility, Slippery Empathy, and Historical Consciousness in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate —SCOTT PROUDFIT Asia and Alwin Nikolais: Interdisciplinarity, Orientalist Tendencies, and Midcentury American Dance —ANGELA K. AHLGREN PART II WITCH CHARACTERS AND WITCHY PERFORMANCE Editor’s Introduction to the Special Section Shifting Shapes: Witch Characters and Witchy Performances —CHRYSTYNA DAIL To Wright the Witch: The Case of Joanna Baillie’s Witchcraft —JANE BARNETTE Nothing Wicked This Way Comes: Shakespeare’s Subversion of Archetypal Witches in The Winter’s Tale —JESSICA HOLT Of Women and Witches: Performing the Female Body in Caryl Churchill’s Vinegar Tom —MAMATA SENGUPTA (Un)Limited: The Influence of Mentorship and Father-Daughter Relationships on Elphaba’s Heroine Journey in Wicked —REBECCA K. HAMMONDS Immersive Witches: New York City under the Spell of Sleep No More and Then She Fell —DAVID BISAHA PART III Essay from the Conference The Robert A. Schanke Award-Winning Essay, MATC 2020 New Conventions for a New Generation: High School Musicals and Broadway in the 2010s —LINDSEY MANTOAN

This work includes Joanna Baillie's important poems and critical prefaces, the tragedies "De Montfort" and "Basil", and the comedy, "The Alienated Manor", together with substantial extracts from her other works.

The Routledge Companion to Romantic Women Writers overviews critical reception for Romantic women writers from their earliest periodical reviews through the most current scholarship and directs users to avenues of future research. It is divided into two parts.The first section offers topical discussions on the status of provincial poets, on women’s engagement in children’s literature, the relation of women writers to their religious backgrounds, the historical backgrounds to women’s orientalism, and their engagement in debates on slavery and abolition.The second part surveys the life and careers of individual women – some 47 in all with sections for biography, biographical resources, works, modern editions, archival holdings, critical reception, and avenues for further research. The final sections of each essay offer further guidance for researchers, including “Signatures” under which the author published, and a “List of Works” accompanied, whenever possible, with contemporary prices and publishing formats. To facilitate research, a robust “Works Cited” includes all texts mentioned or quoted in the essay.

Dana Van Kooy draws critical attention to Percy Bysshe Shelley as a dramatist and argues that his dramas represent a critical paradigm of romanticism in which history is 'staged'. Reading Shelley's dramas as a series of radical stages - historical reenactments and theatrical reproductions - Van Kooy highlights the cultural significance of the drama and the theatre in shaping and contesting constructions of both the sovereign nation and the global empire in the post-Napoleonic era. This book is about the power of performance to challenge and reformulate cultural memories that were locked in historical narratives and in Britain's theatrical repertoire. It examines each of Shelley's dramas as a specific radical stage that reformulates the familiar cultural performances of war, revolution, slavery and domestic tyranny. Shelley's plays invite audiences to step away from these horrors and to imagine their lives as something other than a tragedy or a melodrama where characters are entrapped in cycles of violence or struck blind or silent by fear. Although Shelley's dramas are few in number they engage a larger cultural project of aesthetic and political reform that constituted a groundswell of activism that took place during the Romantic period.

As theatre and drama of the Romantic Period undergo a critical reassessment among scholars internationally, the contributions of women as playwrights, actresses, and managers are also being revalued. This volume, which brings together leading British, North American, and Italian critics, is a crucial step towards reclaiming the importance of women's dramatic and theatrical activities during the period. Writing for the theatre implied assuming a public role, a hazardous undertaking for women who, especially after the French Revolution, were assigned to the private, primarily domestic, sphere. As the contributors examine the covert strategies women used to become full participants in the public theatre, they shed light on the issue of women's agency, expressed both through the writing of highly politicized or ethicized drama, as in the case of Elizabeth Inchbald or Joanna Baillie, and through women's professional practice as theatre managers and stage producers, as in the case of Elizabeth Vestris and Jane Scott. Among the topics considered are women's history plays, domesticity, ethics and sexuality in women's closet drama, the politics of drama and performance, and the role of women as managers and producers. Specialists in performance studies, Romantic Period drama, and women's writing will find the essays both challenging and inspiring.

Much of the biography is based on Baillie's now published letters (FDUP, 1999) to family members, literary figures, scientists, religious leaders, artists, and friends in England, Scotland, and the United States; and her correspondence is supplemented with further biographical evidence and with critical commentary on her works."--BOOK JACKET.