Strolling players of empire : theater and performances of power in the British imperial provinces, 1656-1833 / Kathleen Wilson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Wilson, Kathleen, author.

Contributor:

Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library (University of Pennsylvania)

Series:

Critical perspectives on empire

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Traveling theater--Political aspects--Great Britain--History--18th century.

Traveling theater.

Theater and society--Great Britain--History--18th century.

Theater and society.

English drama--18th century--History and criticism.

English drama.

National characteristics, British, in literature.

Hegemony--Great Britain.

Hegemony.

Cultural relations.

British colonies.

Civilization.

Great Britain--Colonies--History--18th century.

Great Britain.

Great Britain--Civilization--18th century.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

History.

Physical Description:

xvi, 480 pages, 12 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2022.

Summary:

"This book tracks some of the novel and colorful journeys that British theatre embarked upon over the course of the eighteenth century, from nation to empire and back again. It examines unstudied circuits of theatrical performance extending across the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans to encompass London, Kingston (and other urban centers of Jamaica), Calcutta, Fort Marlborough (Sumatra), St. Helena and Port Jackson (New South Wales), as well as London and archipelagic provincial towns. In each space, the performance of British drama helped consolidate a national and imperial culture that was being forged both within and beyond the nation's borders. Yet in crisscrossing political and oceanic boundaries, and circulating texts, bodies, ideas and practices meant to incarnate the best of the English, and, secondarily, British character, the stage also mobilized competing ideas about authority, cultural difference and national belonging that emanated from the small as well as the great across the flow of practices of everyday life in Britain's expansive domains. Retailing historical myths and collective fantasies, including the helpful if fictive notion of a "national character" itself, theatre was the ultimate emblem of English cultural and racial capital in an age of sail, seizing the imaginations and animating the actions of British subjects and their others ceaselessly traversing the globe"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Prologue: Strollers without borders

Introduction: Britain's theatrical empire

Peripheralizing the spheres : theatrical assemblages of the imperial provinces

Rowe's Fair penitent as global history : colonial family strategies and the imperatives of nation

The lure of the other : Jews, Nabobs and enslaved Africans in a transcolonial imaginary

Performances of freedom : Jamaican Maroons in imperial transit

Blackface empire : or, the slavery meridian

Zanga's colony : revenge in Sydney

Performing the wonder in Sumatra : theatrical ethnography in a New World history

In conclusion: Napoleonic Gothic, or St. Helena as center of the British world.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Wilson, Kathleen. Strolling players of empire

ISBN:

9781108479783

1108479782

OCLC:

1334896152

Publisher Number:

90101152186