University Press Copublishing Division / Bucknell University Press
Pages: 310
•
Trim: 6½ x 9½
978-1-61148-364-2 • Hardback • December 2011 • $133.00 • (£102.00)
978-1-61148-365-9 • eBook • December 2011 • $126.00 • (£97.00)
Brett D. Wilson is associate professor of English at the College of William & Mary. His articles on sympathy and national feeling in eighteenth-century British drama have appeared in ELH and Eighteenth-Century Studies.
Preface.
Introduction.
“A female patriot? Vanity! Absurd!”
Chapter 1.
“How Hard Is the Condition of Our Sex”:The Female Advocate and the Subject of Sympathy in The Fair Penitent
Chapter 2.
That Sex's Care:Sentimental Union and the Common Good
Chapter 3.
Public Victims:Janes, Jacobites, and the National She-Tragedy
Chapter 4.
“Even in the Softer Sex”:Gendering Patriotism in the Plays of James Thomson
Epilogue.
Circulating Power, Public Affections, and the Re-masculinization of British Public Spirit
Works Cited
A Race of Female Patriots is fine study of a select number of political dramas in the first half of the eighteenth century. ... Wilson has given us a provocative study of eighteenth-century tragedies. His analysis expands our understanding of the impact of revolutionary rhetoric beyond the more familiar political essays and disputes of the first half of the eighteenth century.
— Modern Philology
The strength of the book lies in the way it provides a new sense of the cultural logic of these texts considered generically as exemplars of a specifically Whig ideology.
— American Behavioral Scientist