Rape in Period Drama Television

Katherine Byrne is lecturer of English at Ulster University.Julie Anne Taddeo is research professor of history at University of Maryland.

• Chapter One: Rape Fantasy and the “Lawless” Eighteenth Century: Poldark and BanishedChapter Two: Rape Responses, Romance, and Rape-RevengeChapter Three: “Dismissed, ignored, and woefully underreported”: Male Rape in Bridgerton and OutlanderChapter Four: Rape as a Weapon of War: Das Boot and A Place to Call HomeChapter Five: Procurement and Period Drama: Rape for Money in Harlots Chapter Six: “If you can’t rape your wife, who can you rape?”: Marital Rape in The Forsyte Saga and PoldarkChapter Seven: Rape and the Older Woman

Given its preponderance in so much period drama, it is, I suppose, symptomatic of the relative normalization of sexual violence on screen that the depiction of rape has been largely neglected in media scholarship. Tis book therefore not only fills a gap in the conventional sense, it also alters the discursive lens, bringing into powerful focus the way in which rape is so taken for granted as a regular trope, despite the genre’s ‘cosy’ image. From Poldark to Peaky Blinders, and from Downton Abbey to Outlander, rape has been a core plot element, used to drive dramatic tension and suspense, to define or transform characters, and—of course— to iterate, and occasionally to problematize, ideologies of gendered power. Yet its depiction remains a profoundly contested issue. Rape in Period Drama Television by Katherine Byrne and Julie Anne Taddeo is therefore timely, coming in the wake of and responding to #MeToo and other campaigns concerning sexual exploitation, and critically interrogating the extent to which rape has been a recurrent feature of every variation within the genre from literary adaptations to gangster narratives... [This] is an extremely important intervention into the history of the genre and of the representation of sexual violence on television.