Thomas Holcroft’s Revolutionary Drama: Reception and Afterlives

Product Description A key figure in British literary circles following the French Revolution, novelist and playwright Thomas Holcroft promoted ideas of reform and equality informed by the philosophy of his close friend William Godwin. Arrested for treason in 1794 and released without trial, Holcroft was notorious in his own time, but today appears mainly as a supporting character in studies of 1790s literary activism. Thomas Holcroft’s Revolutionary Drama authoritatively reintroduces and reestablishes this central figure of the revolutionary decade by examining his life, plays, memoirs, and personal correspondence. In engaging with theatrical censorship, apostacy, and the response of audiences and critics to radical drama, this thoughtful study also demonstrates how theater functions in times of political repression. Despite his struggles, Holcroft also had major successes: this book examines his surprisingly robust afterlife, as his plays, especially The Road to Ruin, were repeatedly revived worldwide in the nineteenth century. About the Author AMY GARNAI teaches at the Kibbutzim College of Education in Tel Aviv, Israel. She is the author of Revolutionary Imaginings in the 1790s: Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, Elizabeth Inchbald, and her essays have been published in Women’s Writing, SEL, Eighteenth-Century Studies, The Wordsworth Circle, and The Review of English Studies.