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75 decades—literary criticism and cultural history have restored women writers to their rightful place in our conception of the past. The importance ofHaywood totheearly novel is without question. Her Love in Excess, as Mr. Oakleaf points out, was ‘‘the spectacularly successful first novel of a spectacularly successful novelist.’’ The Injur’d Husband and Lasselia, while notable neither for being the first nor the best of Haywood’s work (as Mr. Beasley acknowledges), are typical examples of Haywood’s narrative preoccupations with the expression and theconsequences of female desire. Manley, while less prolific in her literary output than Haywood, was every bit as prominent on the literary scene and every bit as scandalous in her personal life. Her pseudoautobiographical narrative is a fascinating example of the self-justification that underwrites all self-construction, and Ms. Zelinsky excellently separates the threads of historical reality and imaginative fabrication that Manley weaves into her portrait of Rivella. In their introductory remarks, all three editors bravely face the question of aesthetic achievement. Ms. Zelinsky (in Rivella ) and Mr. Oakleaf (in Love in Excess) convincingly argue narrative skill and seriousness of thematic purpose in Rivella and Love in Excess respectively. If Mr. Beasley does not persuade us of similar excellences in Lasselia and The Injur’d Husband, it is because his purpose is to draw attention to the way these texts ‘‘helped to stimulate the consciousnessof an entire generation of women,’’ the way texts expand, deepen, and elaborate our sense of a moment in time. Elizabeth Kraft University of Georgia LISA A. FREEMAN. Character’s Theater: Genre and Identity on the EighteenthCentury English Stage. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania, 2002. Pp. 298. $47.50. Ms. Freeman’s book declares war on ‘‘major premises’’ such as ‘‘the study of eighteenth-century drama can contribute little to how we understand the literary forms and cultural contents of this period .’’ Seeking an ‘‘interpretive account of eighteenth-century drama and its cultural work,’’ Ms. Freeman confronts significant issues and has impressive conclusions , such as, ‘‘plays functioned in the eighteenth century not only as a form of entertainment but as a medium through which authors could attempt, under the epistemological and formal constraints of genre, to engage with, represent, and make sense of the changing literary and socioeconomic landscape of English life.’’Moreover, she has much of value to say about both well- and lesser-known plays of the period. After the Introduction, Ms. Freeman devotes a chapter each to ‘‘Staged Identities ’’; ‘‘Plays About Plays’’; ‘‘Tragedy ’s Tragic Flaw: National Characterand Feminine Unruliness’’ (tragedy’s demise being ‘‘read as an index for a national identity crisis’’); ‘‘Constitutional Parodies of Identity’’ on the Comic Stage; and ‘‘Sentimental Comedy’’(the conflicts ‘‘that emerged over the ‘breeding’of this new genre’’). In each, she bears down swiftly on what she perceives as outdated and limited views of a play and thetheater (she is especially successful in evaluating ‘‘plays about plays’’). However, the battle plan at times goes astray. For all the praise due to her careful scholarship and thorough reading of secondary sources, critics such as Agnew , Hnatko, Klein, and Sedgwick are too 76 conspicuous in her text. (Then again, the absence of someone like Richard Bevis is also felt in the discussion of stage comedy .) Although she explains why she omits Shakespeare, her discussion about tragedy, for example, must remain suspended or qualified without him. Larger conclusions about the drama, in addition, are determined primarily from selected texts—for me, another reason the study must be qualified. Notwithstanding her flowing and lucid prose, structural ‘‘idiosyncrasies ’’ are bruising, such as her fondness for transitional introductions (beginning sentenceswith‘‘Indeed’’)and her overused anticipatory declarations (‘‘I will demonstrate’’or ‘‘I argue that’’). For all its sophistication, this book often gears its wording toward the uninitiated rather than the specialist, that is, in the ‘‘I will’s,’’ in unnecessary plot synopses of major plays, and in critical observations old to the specialist. The book could have and should have been shorter. A good ‘‘reminder’’ study and a fresh contribution, Ms. Freeman’s study may not carry the day in being the best way to view the period’s drama (‘‘I have highlighted the ways in which the representation of...

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