British Pirates in Print and Performance

This book tracks the interconnections among pirates, pirates in print, and pirates on stage. Performance is the shared strategy for all three. Our chapters examine accounts of piracy in historical records, in adventure stories and romance, and, crucial to the emphasis on performativity, in stage representation. British pirates, in both print and performance, are discussed within a nexus of influence that cares very little for generic distinction beyond the constant of performativity. In fact and in fiction, the role-playing pirate is traced through dozens of stage performances, including the nautical Gothic melodrama, the adaptations of Byron, Scott, and Cooper, and the exploits of lusty she-pirates.

Frederick Burwick is a Research Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, USA and is author and editor of thirty books and over one hundred and forty articles. He is editor of The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and general editor of the three-volume Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature. His recent books include Romantic Drama: Acting and Reacting and Playing to the Crowd, London Popular Theatre, 1780-1830.

Manushag N. Powell is Associate Professor of English and a University Faculty Scholar at Purdue University, USA, where she teaches classes on British literature and culture, transatlantic literature, the long eighteenth century, the novel, British drama, piracy, and the Gothic. She is the author of Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals, and her essays have appeared in ECS, EC:TI, JEMCS, Literature Compass, SEL, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, JEMCS, and the Blackwell Companion to British Literature.