Corrosive Solace: Affect, Biopolitics, and the Realignment of the Repertoire, 1780-1800

by Daniel O'Quinn

Overview

In Corrosive Solace, Daniel O’Quinn argues that the loss of the American colonies instantiated a complex reorganization in sociability and politics in the British metropole that has had long-lasting effects on British national and imperial culture, which can be seen and analyzed within its performative repertoire. He examines how the analysis of feeling or affect can be deployed to address the inchoate causal relation between historical events and their mediation. In this sense, Corrosive Solace’s goals are twofold: first, to outline the methodologies necessary for dealing with the affective recognition of historical crisis; and second, to make the historically familiar strange again, and thus make visible key avenues for discussion that have remained dormant. Both of these objectives turn on recognition: How do we theorize the implicit affective recognition of crisis in a distant historical moment? And how do we recognize what we, in our present moment, cannot discern?

Corrosive Solace addresses this complex cultural reorientation by attending less to “new” cultural products than to the theoretical and historical problems posed by looking at the transformation of “old” plays and modes of performance. These “old” plays—Shakespeare, post-Restoration comedy and she-tragedy—were a vital plank of the cultural patrimony, so much of O’Quinn’s analysis lies in how tradition was recovered and redirected to meet urgent social and political needs. Across the arc of Corrosive Solace, he tracks how the loss of the American War forced Britons to refashion the repertoire of cultural signs and social dispositions that had subtended its first empire in the Atlantic world in a way more suited to its emergent empire in South Asia.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781512823110
Publisher:	University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Publication date:	10/11/2022
Pages:	376
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Daniel O’Quinn is Professor of the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph. He is author of Engaging the Ottoman Empire: Vexed Mediations, 1690–1815, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

Part I Corrosive Solace

Chapter 1 Between a Rock and a Hard Place: The Contingent Politics of She-Tragedy 51

Chapter 2 The Other Macbeth: Shakespeare in Siddons's Hands 94

Chapter 3 Thalia Inter Alia: The Biopolitical Turn in Post-American Comedy 137

Part II Interrupted Futures

Chapter 4 Interrupted Histories: Henry the Eighth, Coriolanus, and the Disclosure of Biopolitics 183

Chapter 5 What Unhappiness Does: The Futures of Post-Revolutionary Comedy 227

Chapter 6 Utopian Discomfort: Pizarro's Bridge to the Cosmopolitical Future 266

Conclusion 307

Notes 321

Bibliography 341

Index 355

Editorial Reviews

"Corrosive Solace represents an authoritative statement on the importance of the theatre to what Daniel O’Quinn characterizes as the ‘post-American condition,’ i.e., how society, politics, and culture in Britain dealt with the loss of the American colonies and within a few short years, a new imperial dispensation, looking toward India and the threat of Napoleon in Europe. The book traces in fine detail ‘what it feels like’ to experience the pressure of historical change without being able to articulate or fully encompass what that change means. It is thoroughly and admirably interdisciplinary, seamlessly integrating approaches from theatre history, performance studies, cultural studies, affect theory, and social and political history to produce concentrated but still lucid readings of a number of key texts, performers, and events. Together these readings make for a new history of the 1780s and 1790s, especially in relation to the history of the broader politico-cultural role of the patent theatres, that will radically alter how we view these crucial decades."

University of York Gillian Russell

"The significance of O’Quinn’s argument is its ability to link the everyday and the personal with the social, the political, and the cultural. At the level of both form and content, O’Quinn attempts to understand the implications and potentialities of affective recognitions, aesthetic mediations, formal transformations, and generic innovations in all their urgency and topicality, as a response to a cultural need to adapt to a period of turbulent transition instigated by historical crises. The argument progresses from issues of embodiment to questions of consciousness to transformations in processes of socialization to explain the emergence of systemic norms. It effectively reconciles phenomenological investigations with structuralist manifestations, offering a forensic cultural analysis of affect and affective sociability.

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Studies in Romaticism

Corrosive Solace represents an authoritative statement on the importance of the theatre to what Daniel O’Quinn characterizes as the ‘post-American condition,’ i.e., how society, politics, and culture in Britain dealt with the loss of the American colonies and within a few short years, a new imperial dispensation, looking toward India and the threat of Napoleon in Europe. The book traces in fine detail ‘what it feels like’ to experience the pressure of historical change without being able to articulate or fully encompass what that change means. It is thoroughly and admirably interdisciplinary, seamlessly integrating approaches from theatre history, performance studies, cultural studies, affect theory, and social and political history to produce concentrated but still lucid readings of a number of key texts, performers, and events. Together these readings make for a new history of the 1780s and 1790s, especially in relation to the history of the broader politico-cultural role of the patent theatres, that will radically alter how we view these crucial decades.

Universityof York Gillian Russell