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Entertaining Crisis in the Atlantic Imperium, 1770-1790

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Less than twenty years after asserting global dominance in the Seven Years' War, Britain suffered a devastating defeat when it lost the American colonies. Daniel O'Quinn explores how the theaters and the newspapers worked in concert to mediate the events of the American war for British audiences and how these convergent media attempted to articulate a post-American future for British imperial society.Building on the methodological innovations of his 2005 publication Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770-1800, O'Quinn demonstrates how the reconstitution of British imperial subjectivities involved an almost nightly engagement with a rich entertainment culture that necessarily incorporated information circulated in the daily press. Each chapter investigates different moments in the American crisis through the analysis of scenes of social and theatrical performance and through careful readings of works by figures such as Richard Brinsley Sheridan, William Cowper, Hannah More, Arthur Murphy, Hannah Cowley, George Colman, and Georg Friedrich Handel. Through a close engagement with this diverse entertainment archive, O'Quinn traces the hollowing out of elite British masculinity during the 1770s and examines the resulting strategies for reconfiguring ideas of gender, sexuality, and sociability that would stabilize national and imperial relations in the 1780s. Together, O'Quinn's two books offer a dramatic account of the global shifts in British imperial culture that will be of interest to scholars in theater and performance studies, eighteenth-century studies, Romanticism, and trans-Atlantic studies.

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

""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.""

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