Promotional Information

Danny O'Quinn, who has written brilliantly on the performative dialogues between London and British-ruled India during the Hastings trial, here takes on the subtle shifts of national mood as Britain reacted to the American war of independence. In this masterful account, O'Quinn relates the coextensive media of newspapers and performance (theatre and music) to demonstrate key incidents in the chastened nation's rearticulation of British liberty, subjunctively projected onto a future conditioned by divine will. Never before has entertainment been so explicitly demonstrated as central to the conception of sovereignty, the practices of empire and the public life, and the defining values of British subjectivity. -- Tracy C. Davis, Northwestern University Entertaining Crisis is cultural history as it should be done, a meticulously researched account of how the British mediated and shaped the news from America in the 1770s and 1780s through theatre and related forms of public performance. It is a major achievement which not only reinforces the centrality of theatre in eighteenth-century life but also advances a genuinely interdisciplinary eighteenth-century and Romantic studies. -- Gillian Russell, Australian National University

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Entertainment, Mediation, and the Future of Empire
I. Diversions
1. The Agents of Mars and the Temples of Venus: John Burgoyne's Remediated Pleasures
2. Out to America: Performance and the Politics of Mediated Space
II. Regime Change
3. To Rise in Greater Splendor: John André's Errant Knights
4. "The body" of David Garrick: Richard Brinsley Sheridan, America, and the Ends of Theatre
III. Celebrations
5. Which Is the Man? Remediation, Interruption, and the Celebration of Martial Masculinity
6. Days and Nights of the Living Dead: Handelmania
Coda: "In praise of the oak, its advantage and prosperity"
Notes
Index

About the Author

Daniel O'Quinn is a professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph, Ontario, and author of Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770-1800, also published by Johns Hopkins. He is also coeditor of the Cambridge Companion to British Theater, 1730-1830 and editor of Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan.

Reviews

The result of reading such an intense and lengthy study is a feeling of great satisfaction. -- Elizabeth Fay Wordsworth Circle Deserves a prominent place among recent publications by literary scholars... investigative, interpretative, and integrative. With Daniel O'Quinn, it is also intrepid. Restoration and Eighteenth Century Theatre Research This is an erudite and entertaining book, and a brief review like this one cannot really do justice to the complexity of O'Quinn's analysis or to the sheer number and variety of texts, events, and artifacts that are examined in the course of his discussion.This is a book that will requard and enlighten any patient reader with an interest in cultural studies and the history of the British empire. AMS Press In this remarkably original and detailed study... O'Quinn's authoritative synthesis of theatricality and audience response gives us a deep and refreshing understanding of how a culture constitutes itself through creative expression and thoughtful mediation, and ultimately, how it knows that despite defeat, the show must still go on. -- Leslie Elizabeth Eckel Studies in Romanticism Entertaining Crisis in the Atlantic Imperium is an engaging and erudite study of British reception of the American Revolutionary War through the combined media force of theatre and newspapers during the late eighteenth century... Ultimately, this book presents a satisfying chronological narrative that contributes to greater understanding of how media reception of social performances shaped British subjectivity during and after the American Revolution. -- Daniel Smith Theatre Journal