Ravishment of Reason

Governance and the Heroic Idioms of the Late Stuart Stage, 1660–1690

Brandon Chua

Ravishment of Reason examines the heroic dramas written for the restored English theatres in the later seventeenth century, reading them as complex and sophisticated responses to a crisis of public life in the wake of the mid-century regicide and revolution. The unique form of the Restoration heroic play, with its scenes of imperial conquest peopled by hesitating and indecisive heroes, interrogates traditional oppositions of agency and passivity, autonomy and servility, that structure conventional narratives of political service and public virtue, exploring, in the process, new and often unsettling models of order and governance. Situating the dramas of Dryden, Behn, Boyle, Lee, and Crowne in their historical and intellectual context of civil war and the destabilizing theories of government that came in its wake, Brandon Chua offers an account of a culture’s attempts to reconcile civic purpose with political stability after an age of revolutionary change.

University Press Copublishing Division / Bucknell University Press

Pages: 230 • Trim: 6½ x 9½

978-1-61148-582-0 • Hardback • September 2014 • $128.00 • (£98.00)

978-1-61148-583-7 • eBook • September 2014 • $121.50 • (£94.00)

Series: Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650–1850

Subjects: Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, History / Europe / Great Britain / General, Drama / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh

Ravishment of Reason

Governance and the Heroic Idioms of the Late Stuart Stage, 1660–1690

Hardback

eBook

Summary

Ravishment of Reason examines the heroic dramas written for the restored English theatres in the later seventeenth century, reading them as complex and sophisticated responses to a crisis of public life in the wake of the mid-century regicide and revolution. The unique form of the Restoration heroic play, with its scenes of imperial conquest peopled by hesitating and indecisive heroes, interrogates traditional oppositions of agency and passivity, autonomy and servility, that structure conventional narratives of political service and public virtue, exploring, in the process, new and often unsettling models of order and governance. Situating the dramas of Dryden, Behn, Boyle, Lee, and Crowne in their historical and intellectual context of civil war and the destabilizing theories of government that came in its wake, Brandon Chua offers an account of a culture’s attempts to reconcile civic purpose with political stability after an age of revolutionary change.

Details

University Press Copublishing Division / Bucknell University Press

Pages: 230 • Trim: 6½ x 9½

978-1-61148-582-0 • Hardback • September 2014 • $128.00 • (£98.00)

978-1-61148-583-7 • eBook • September 2014 • $121.50 • (£94.00)

Series: Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650–1850

Subjects: Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, History / Europe / Great Britain / General, Drama / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh

Author

Brandon Chua is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Queensland node of the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe 1100-1800), where he is currently researching the literary culture of the English 1650s in relation to the civil wars and Interregnum. He also teaches early modern and eighteenth-century literature at The University of Queensland.

Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction

One: “Heroicall Pictures”: Government and the Restoration Heroic Play

Two: “New Rights we Grant not, but the Old Declare”: History, Friendship, and Consent in Roger Boyle’s Henry V (1664)

Three: “Tis All but Ceremony Which Is Past”: Conversion and Heroic Passions in John Dryden’s The Conquest of Granada, Parts One and Two (1670-1672)

Four: Shakespeare's History Lesson: John Crowne's Misery of Civil War (1680)

Five: “Cajoling the People with his Known Industry”: The Passions and Spectacular Politics in Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus

Six: The Politics of Cowardice: Fear, Interest, and Security in Aphra Behn’s The Widdow Ranter (1689)

Seven: “Half Loath and Half Consenting”: Interpretive Relativism and Incest in John Dryden's Don Sebastian (1690)

Conclusion

Bibliography
Index
About the Author