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Author Biography

Diana Solomon is Associate Professor of English at Simon Fraser University. She is the author of Prologues and Epilogues of Restoration Theatre: Gender and Comedy, Performance and Print (Delaware, 2013), co-editor of Women and Comedy: History, Theory, Practice (Fairleigh Dickinson, 2014), and co-author of Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation (Chicago, 2018) as well as many articles on actresses, Restoration and eighteenth-century theatre, and comedy.

Abstract

The publication of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea makes it possible to teach not only a much wider assorted of her edited poetry, but also Finch’s two dramas: the tragicomedy The Triumphs of Love and Innocence, and the tragedy Aristomenes. This essay proposes integrating Finch’s plays into a course on Restoration and eighteenth-century drama by proposing a class, “Genre Trouble,” which sets them in dialogue with frequently-taught plays of the era. Included herein are a syllabus of primary and secondary sources, suggestions for discussing Finch’s plays and dramatic paratexts in comparison to works by Behn, Centlivre, Dryden, Otway, Rowe, and Wycherley, and a lesson plan that enables students to investigate differences between “closet” and professionally staged drama and understand how a playwright’s gender figures into this divide.

Keywords

closet drama, prologue, paratext, performance, Restoration and eighteenth-century drama

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