Kristina Straub, Director of Literary & Cultural Studies Program, Releases New Routledge Anthology

By Angela Januzzi ajanuzzi(through)andrew.cmu.edu

The work of Professor Kristina Straub, Director of Literary & Cultural Studies Program in the Department of English, spans feminist cultural studies, sexuality studies, performance studies, and 18th-century British cultural studies. Yet from the start of her career, Straub’s approaches have especially refigured understandings of European theater and the histories of Western entertainment as we know it today.

Earlier this year, Straub edited and released "The Routledge Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama" (co-edited with Misty G. Anderson from the University of Tennessee and Daniel O'Quinn from the University of Guelph).

Unlike any other anthology in its field, the book is a collection of plays with contextual materials that will allow readers to imaginatively reconstruct performance conditions of specific nights at the theater during the 18th century. (For example, who was in the audience and what were they gossiping about the night Charles II fell in love with Nell Gwyn, who was performing in Dryden's Secret Love? How were events in the theater that night important to the image of the British monarchy and the consolidation of state power after the English civil wars?)

"Danny, Misty, and I were reacting to the ways that 18th century plays are too often taught, as texts to be silently read," said Straub, "rather than as the lively and socially charged performances that they were in rowdy, fully lit playhouses where the audience performed just as much as the actors."

"Plays drew diverse crowds who brought with them the politics and social buzz of the day. We came as close as we could to giving our readers samplings of the print and visual culture that an audience would have brought with them into the playhouse on a specific night."

Each of the 20 plays featured in the collection is accompanied by an array of print and online supplementary materials, including primary critical sources, commentaries, illustrations, and reviews of productions, from Restoration tragedy and comedies of manners, to ballad opera and gothic pieces.

One of Straub’s works earlier in her career, "Sexual Suspects" explores actors and ideologies of sexuality in 18th-century Britain: that work helped to direct theater and feminist studies of the early modern period toward a now-burgeoning interest in sexuality in performance and popular culture. Recent work also includes an exhibit curated with Janine Barchas at the Folger Shakespeare Library (Will & Jane: Shakespeare, Austen, and the Cult of Celebrity), and multiple articles on cultural as well as aesthetic performances, particularly of Shakespeare plays, in the 18th-century playhouse.

This collection follows Kristina Straub, Misty G. Anderson, and Daniel O’Quinn’s 2017 "Routledge Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama." "In fact," said Straub, "the current book grew out of our work on this first."

This most recent anthology shifts the reader’s focus to the event. In doing so, the collection not only reimagines and makes immediate the theater of the 18th century — it vibrantly reminds modern readers and students how their own experiences of entertainment (and, even now, live performances) are still directly shaped by the contemporary moment in which they are performed, as ever.