In eighteenth-century England, actresses were frequently dismissed as mere prostitutes trading on their sexual power rather than their talents. Yet they were, Felicity Nussbaum argues, central to the success of a newly commercial theater. Urban, recently moneyed, and thoroughly engaged with their audiences, celebrated actresses were among the first women to achieve social mobility, cultural authority, and financial independence. In fact, Nussbaum contends, the eighteenth century might well be called the "age of the actress" in the British theater, given women's influence on the dramatic repertory and, through it, on the definition of femininity. Treating individual star actresses who helped spark a cult of celebrity-especially Anne Oldfield, Susannah Cibber, Catherine Clive, Margaret Woffington, Frances Abington, and George Anne Bellamy-Rival Queens reveals the way these women animated issues of national identity, property, patronage, and fashion in the context of their dramatic performances. Actresses intentionally heightened their commercial appeal by catapulting the rivalries among themselves to center stage. They also boldly challenged in importance the actor-managers who have long dominated eighteenth-century theater history and criticism. Felicity Nussbaum combines an emphasis on the actresses themselves with close analysis of their diverse roles in works by major playwrights, including George Farquhar, Nicholas Rowe, Colley Cibber, Arthur Murphy, David Garrick, Isaac Bickerstaff, and Richard Sheridan. Hers is a comprehensive and original argument about the importance of actresses as the first modern subjects, actively shaping their public identities to make themselves into celebrated properties.

Slavery as depicted in literature and culture is examined in this wide-ranging collection. On 25 March 1807, the bill for the abolition of the Slave Trade within the British colonies was passed by an overwhelming majority in the House of Commons, becoming law from 1 May. This new collection of essays marks this crucialbut conflicted historical moment and its troublesome legacies. They discuss the literary and cultural manifestations of slavery, abolition and emancipation from the eighteenth century to the present day, addressing such subjects and issues as: the relationship between Christian and Islamic forms of slavery and the polemical and scholarly debates these have occasioned; the visual representations of the moment of emancipation; the representation of slave rebellion; discourses of race and slavery; memory and slavery; and captivity and slavery. Among the writers and thinkers discussed are: Frantz Fanon, William Earle Jr, Olaudah Equiano, Charlotte Smith, Caryl Phillips, Bryan Edwards,Elizabeth Marsh, as well as a wide range of other thinkers, writers and artists. The volume also contains the hitherto unpublished text of an essay by the naturalist Henry Smeathman, Oeconomy of the Slave Ship. Contributors: GEORGE BOULUKOS, DEIRDRE COLEMAN, MARAROULA JOANNOU, GERALD MACLEAN, FELICITY NUSSBAUM, DIANA PATON, SARA SALIH, LINCOLN SHLENSKY, MARCUS WOOD

Alf layla wa layla (known in English as A Thousand and One Nights or The Arabian Nights) changed the world on a scale unrivalled by any other literary text. Inspired by a fourteenth-century Syrian manuscript, the appearance of Antoine Galland's twelve-volume Mille et Une Nuits in English translation (1704-1717), closely followed by the Grub Street English edition, drew the text into European circulation. Over the following three hundred years, a widely heterogeneous series of editions, compilations, translations, and variations circled the globe to reveal the absorption of The Arabian Nights into English, Continental, and global literatures, and its transformative return to modern Arabic literature, where it now enjoys a degree of prominence that it had never attained during the classical period. Beginning with a thorough introduction situating The Arabian Nights in its historical and cultural contexts-and offering a fresh examination of the text's multiple locations in the long history of modern Orientalism--this collection of essays by noted scholars from "East," "West," and in-between reassesses the influence of the Nights in Enlightenment and Romantic literature, as well as the text's vigorous afterlife in the contemporary Arabic novel.