This book explores shifting representations and receptions of the arms-bearing woman on the British stage during a period in which she comes to stand in Britain as a striking symbol of revolutionary chaos. The book makes a case for viewing the British Romantic theatre as an arena in which the significance of the armed woman is constantly remodelled and reappropriated to fulfil diverse ideological functions. Used to challenge as well as to enforce established notions of sex and gender difference, she is fashioned also as an allegorical tool, serving both to condemn and to champion political and social rebellion at home and abroad. Magnifying heroines who appear on stage wielding pistols, brandishing daggers, thrusting swords, and even firing explosives, the study spotlights the intricate and often surprising ways in which the stage amazon interacts with Anglo-French, Anglo-Irish, Anglo-German, and Anglo-Spanish debates at varying moments across the French revolutionary and Napoleonic campaigns. At the same time, it foregrounds the extent to which new dramatic genres imported from Europe –notably, the German Sturm und Drang and the French-derived melodrama– facilitate possibilities at the turn of the nineteenth century for a refashioned female warrior, whose degree of agency, destructiveness, and heroism surpasses that of her tragic and sentimental predecessors.

This 2001 book looks at how British drama and popular entertainment were affected by the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars.

Palgrave Studies in The Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print features work that does not fit comfortably within established boundaries - whether between periods or between disciplines. Uniquely, it combines efforts to engage the power and materiality of print with explorations of gender, race, and class. By attending as well to intersections of literature with the visual arts, medicine, law, and science, the series enables a large-scale rethinking of the origins of modernity.

Based on compelling new research and drawing on recent developments in literary and historical studies, The Theatres of War reveals the importance of the theatre in the shaping of responses to the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793-1815). Gillian Russell explores the roles of the army and navy as both actors and audiences, showing that theatricality was crucial to the self-perception of soldiers and sailors fighting on behalf of an often distant domestic audience.

Frederick Burwick reveals how the most volatile developments in British drama from the 1790s to 1830s took place in the industrial provinces.

Worrall presents an innovative transposition of social assemblage theory into eighteenth-century British theatre and performance history.

A lively and accessible account of the most popular form of nineteenth-century English theatre, and its continuing influence today.