Negative Spaces: British Women Playwrights And The Staging Of Absence, 1770-1830

Abstract

This project focuses on women playwrights of the English Romantic period. It argues that they engaged powerfully with a breadth of issues in ways inflected and informed by their gender in order to rewrite inherited narratives of politics, culture, economics, history, and philosophy. Its central claim is that these women fundamentally reworked the concept of absence, transforming it from one of lack to a way of displaying the silences, subjugations, and sacrifices of women in English culture at large. By examining these writers, contemporary scholars can uncover new methods of resistance to forms of broad cultural oppression that continue to persist today. Ultimately, the goal of the dissertation is to contribute to the larger social project of recovering historically marginalized voices in order to better appreciate their contributions to contemporary society.