National Myth and Imperial Fantasy

Eighteenth-century drama is often dismissed as homogenous, aesthetically uninteresting, or politically complacent. This book reveals the incredibly intriguing and intricate nature of the period's history plays and their often messy dramatisaton of the complexities of patriotic rhetoric and national identification.

'Marshall provides significant insight into how the violent realities of the colonial endeavour were either elided by the fantasy of liberty or reconciled with the rhetoric of patriotism.' - Lisa A. Freeman, Times Literary Supplement

Autorentext
LOUISE MARSHALL lectures in Restoration and eighteenth-century literature at the Department of English and Creative Writing, Aberystwyth University, UK. She has written several articles that discuss the political resonance of the early eighteenth-century stage and the dramatic representation of mythologies of Britishness.

Inhalt
Introduction: Dramatising Britain: Nation, Fantasy and the London Stage, 1719-1745 Ancient Britons and Liberty Kings, Ministers and Favourites, the National Myth in Peril Shakespeare, the National Scaffold Britain, Empire and Julius Caesar Turks, Christians and Imperial Fantasy Conclusion: History, Fantasy and the Staging of Britishness Bibliography Index