Back to the Future: Felicity Nussbaum and the World of Eighteenth-Century Studies

Abstract

Over the past four decades, no one has contributed more to the study of eighteenth-century British literature and culture than Felicity Nussbaum. Her pioneering scholarship opened up the field to new ways of thinking about its writings and dramatic productions by foregrounding race and gender issues and exploring their complicated interconnections. A close look at her work reveals recurring thematic patterns as well as a line of development from early feminist studies to more complex examinations of how women's– and men's–writing during the eighteenth century engaged with, and often helped shape, the cultural and ideological struggles of the period, variously complicit in and resistant to the period's hegemonic assumptions and practices. Her original and provocative studies of the eighteenth-century British stage offer new insights into the opportunities women had for taking advantage of the theater's consumer culture to gain renown and assert agency through their acting and business acumen.