Appropriating the Restoration hero(ine): intertextuality and the transformation of gender identity, 1677-1759

"My dissertation considers how and why representations of female suffering in Restoration tragedy had a profound impact on the development of mid-eighteenth century novels and plays, focusing primarily on the work of Aphra Behn, Thomas Southerne, John Dryden, Samuel Richardson and David Garrick. Previous scholarship on Restoration ""she-tragedies"" has tended to emphasize how their heroines’ descent into hysteria, madness, and death implies a total loss of female agency and power. My project challenges this reigning interpretation: through detailed readings of Richardson’s and Garrick's adaptations of Restoration tragedy, I argue that these influential mid-century authors transform the spectacle of female suffering into a resource for female empowerment and authority over the public sphere. My four chapters analyze Restoration tragic female characters as strongly influencing eighteenth-century writers, who appropriated and adapted them in relation to changing cultural tastes, especially as regards more restricted representations of female sexuality and the heightened desire to promote a seemingly less complex version of female virtue. Scholarship in the long eighteenth-century has suffered from a tendency to emphasize distinctions between the ""licentious"" culture of the Restoration and the “reformed” tastes of mid-eighteenth-century readers and audiences; by allowing these two cultural moments to speak to one another, my project challenges those distinctions and considers the more nuanced ways mid-eighteenth century’s writers like Richardson and Garrick were informed and influenced by Restoration drama."

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English Literature

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2016

Author dc:creator

• Holguin, Marilyn M

Contributors dc:contributor

• Markley, Robert
• Francis, Bettina M.
• Pollock, Anthony
• Gray, Catharine
• Freeman, Lisa

• Adaption
• Eighteenth-Century
• British literature
• Restoration drama
• novels

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2016 Marilyn Holguin

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/90785

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/90785