Antitheatricality and the Body Public

Lisa A. Freeman is Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is author of Character's Theater: Genre and Identity on the Eighteenth-Century English Stage, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

"Dazzlingly ambitious and meticulously researched. . . . [Antitheatricality and the Body Public] is a testament to the perspicacity of Freeman's thought that her ideas shed light not only on the theater as a key to understanding how societies have defined and debated their constituents in the near and distant past but also on how we might use the theater to think through the constitutional crises of the present and the future." (TDR: The Drama Review) "Lisa Freeman's rich study should take a privileged place alongside the most influential work in the field. . . . Antitheatricality and the Body Public should inspire any reader to pursue the reciprocity between theater and power modeled by her exemplary scholarship." (Theatre Journal) "It is, a bold-but certainly timely-move by Lisa Freeman to analyze antitheatricality anew. She delivers on this task with a thorough and thought-provoking investigation realized in a compelling series of case studies that demonstrate the pervasiveness of antitheatrical onslaughts across theater history. . . . A must-read for researchers working on any period of British or American theater." (Bulletin of the Comediantes) "This book's rigorous historicism and meticulous close readings are impressive, but more importantly, they are foundational to its theoretical reach and power. Freeman's premise that antitheatricality persistently calls on a 'body public,' a particular understanding of the ideal state that includes even as it excludes bodies, is a productive way to consider more than this book's five cases." (Eighteenth-Century Fiction) "As Lévi-Strauss said of cats, the theater 'is good to think with,' especially in moments of social stress and trauma, and Lisa A. Freeman demonstrates just how useful it can be in five meticulously researched case studies. Her book represents an impressive labor of research and writing, chock full of new material in every chapter." (Joseph Roach, Yale University) "A work of great erudition and scholarly merit that shows how antitheatrical rhetoric emerges as a way of mediating social, cultural, and governmental crisis. The result is a highly self-aware and remarkably original argument about the function of cultural regulation." (Daniel O'Quinn, University of Guelph)