Corrosive Solace

Daniel O'Quinn is Professor of the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph. He is author of Engaging the Ottoman Empire: Vexed Mediations, 1690–1815, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

"Read the title carefully and then take a deep breath. For this book offers a phenomenal look at how a collective, embodied, ephemeral phenomenon like theatre evokes affective experiences that distill and register not simply nascent public feeling but also changes in the stylization and mobilization of feelings that both make and mark epochal shifts in cultural history. It is challenging enough to say what any mind-body is feeling. Describing what an unruly body of late eighteenth-century theatre-goers was sensing and specifying how their disparate reactions informed habits of identity and components of Britain's cultural patrimony is the accomplishment of Corrosive Solace." (Eighteenth-Century Fiction) "The significance of O'Quinn's argument is its ability to link the everyday and the personal with the social, the political, and the cultural. At the level of both form and content, O'Quinn attempts to understand the implicationsand potentialities of affective recognitions, aesthetic mediations, formal transformations, and generic innovations in all their urgency and topicality, as a response to a cultural need to adapt to a period of turbulent transition instigated by historical crises. The argument progresses from issues of embodiment to questions of consciousness to transformations in processes of socialization to explain the emergence of systemic norms. It effectively reconciles phenomenological investigations with structuralist manifestations, offering a forensic cultural analysis of affect and affective sociability." (Studies in Romaticism) "O'Quinn's scholarship as a whole offers a sustained and evolving study of how playwrights, performers, critics, and ordinary theatergoers accommodated themselves as imperial citizens during these turbulent decades and naturalized the social relations necessary to sustain geopolitical dominance...Corrosive Solace is an enormously generative work of scholarship to think alongside. O'Quinn's latest book offers new ways of articulating the philosophy of history that is expressed through cultural recycling, with applications that extend well beyond Romantic theater." (Eighteenth-Century Studies) "Corrosive Solace represents an authoritative statement on the importance of the theatre to what Daniel O'Quinn characterizes as the 'post-American condition,' i.e., how society, politics, and culture in Britain dealt with the loss of the American colonies and within a few short years, a new imperial dispensation, looking toward India and the threat of Napoleon in Europe. The book traces in fine detail 'what it feels like' to experience the pressure of historical change without being able to articulate or fully encompass what that change means. It is thoroughly and admirably interdisciplinary, seamlessly integrating approaches from theatre history, performance studies, cultural studies, affect theory, and social and political history to produce concentrated but still lucid readings of a number of key texts, performers, and events. Together these readings make for a new history of the 1780s and 1790s, especially in relation to the history of the broader politico-cultural role of the patent theatres, that will radically alter how we view these crucial decades." (—Gillian Russell, University of York)