 Areas of InterestEighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, drama, theatre history, romanticism, women writers, gender studies, performance studies, gothic literature, electronic literature, digital humanities.
Book ProjectBrilliant Gloom: The Contradictions of British Gothic Drama, 1768-1823 Gothic writing is currently theorized as a literature of terror that thrives on the representation of queer eroticisms and social and political subversion. But these accounts do not adequately consider the numerous gothic plays written and performed in Britain during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This gothic drama contains much more humor, certainty, and affirmation of conventional morality than gothic fiction and poetry. An attention to performance reveals that gothic drama is more transgressive than appears at first reading and that comic delight is an essential component of the gothic experience. Gothic drama can conservatively smooth over cultural ruptures and fears to affirm the status quo as well as progressively reach toward the lower and middling classes to contest patriarchal tyranny. The introduction outlines the assumptions that currently guide gothic criticism and proposes that we reconsider their applicability to gothic drama. The first chapter explores well-known plays by Horace Walpole, Joanna Baillie, and Percy Shelley that fit with these assumptions but have very troubled performance histories. The following three chapters analyze the numerous adaptations, startling spectacles, and eerie apparitions that appeared on stage and more accurately reflect the vibrant contradictions of gothic drama. James Boaden’s Fontainville Forest and George Colman the Younger’s Iron Chest manipulate the material from their source texts to tame their revolutionary potential and establish the playwright’s originality and authority. Colman’s Blue-Beard and Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption; or the Fate of Frankenstein depend on spectacle and color to convey their messages about the difference between human and monster, ideal British citizen and abject alien. And plays by Matthew Lewis, James Cobb, and Margaret Harvey reverse the representation of ghostliness as traditionally found in Shakespeare to reflect new attitudes toward gender, maternity, and paternal authority. Thus we can learn much about cultural constructions of authorship, identity, gender, and sexuality by considering performance history and the interaction between dark gloom and brilliant joviality that distinguishes the gothic from other forms of art and literature.
Publications"There's Something Funny Here: The Strange Humor of Eighteenth-Century Gothic Drama." Gothic Studies (forthcoming 2010). "The Play with a Past: Arthur Wing Pinero's New Drama." Victorian Literature and Culture 37 (2009): 391-409.
"Sites of Disturbance: The Gothic in Electronic Literature" (newhorizons.eliterature.org). March 2008. Companion website for N. Katherine Hayles, Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008.
With Brent Alan James. "What Is Genre?" (www.heatherwozniak.com/genre). May 2006.
Conference Presentations"Gendering Gothic Ghosts in Matthew Lewis's The Castle Spectre and Margaret Harvey's Raymond de Percy," Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association Conference, Claremont, California, November 2008. "Queering the Canon of Gothic Drama," North American Society for the Study of Romanticism Conference, Toronto, Canada, August 2008. "Frankenstein's Monster Goes to Paris: Shelley's Novel on the French Stage." Comparative Literature Conference, California State University, Long Beach, March 2006. "Blue Bodies: Visualizing Alterity on the Romantic London Stage." North American Society for the Study of Romanticism Conference, Montreal, Canada, August 2005. "Deviating from the Source: Adapting Gothic for the English Stage, 1790-1820." International Gothic Association Conference, Montreal, Canada, August 2005. "The Power of Blue: Representing Otherness on London Stages at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century and Beyond." Southern California Eighteenth Century Group Graduate Conference, UCLA, October 2003. "A Legacy of Monsters: Romantic Vampirism in Shelley's Frankenstein and Polidori's 'The Vampyre.'" Southland Conference, UCLA, May 2002.
Research FellowshipsMichael J. Connell Foundation Fellow, Huntington Library, San Marino, California - one month of funding for dissertation research (July 2006) Travel Grant, UCLA Graduate Division - funding to perform disseration research at Victoria and Albert Theatre Collections, London, and Bodleian Library, Oxford University (May 2006) Dissertation Fellowship, UCLA Department of English - one year of funding for dissertation research (2005-2006)
Graduate Courses (at UCLA)Literature and Language:
Professional Skills:
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