Enfilade

Part of the Elements in Eighteenth-Century Connections series from Cambridge UP (digital downloads are available for free until 25 January!).

Laura Engel, The Art of the Actress: Fashioning Identities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2024), 75 pages, ISBN: 978-1009486811 (hardcover), $65 / ISBN: 978-1108977906 (paperback), $22. Also available digitally through Cambridge UP.

The Art of the Actress: Fashioning Identities considers how eighteenth-century visual materials across genres, such as prints, portraits, sculpture, costumes, and accessories, contribute to the understanding of the nuances of female celebrity, fame, notoriety, and scandal. The ‘art’ of the actress refers to the actress represented in visual art, as well as to the actress’s labor and skill in making art ephemerally through performance and tangibly through objects. Moving away from the concept of the ‘actress as muse,’ a relationship that privileges the role of the male artist over the inspirational subject, Laura Engel focuses instead on the varied significance of representations, reproductions, and re-animations of actresses, female artists, and theatrical women across media. Via case studies, this Element explores how the archive charts both a familiar and at times unknown narrative about female performers of the past.

Laura Engel is a Professor in the English Department at Duquesne University, where she specializes in eighteenth-century British literature and theater. She is the author of Women, Performance, and the Material of Memory: The Archival Tourist, 1780–1915 (2019); Austen, Actresses, and Accessories: Much Ado about Muffs (2015); and Fashioning Celebrity: Eighteenth-Century British Actresses and Strategies for Image Making (2011). She also co-edited, with Elaine McGirr, Stage Mothers: Women, Work, and the Theater, 1660–1830 (2014).

c o n t e n t s

Introduction: The Art of the Actress in the Eighteenth Century
1  The Paradox of Pearls
2  The Actress as Artist and the Artist as Actress: Anne Damer and Angelica Kauffman
3  Mary Anne’s Muff: Actresses and Satire
4  Epilogue: Unfinished Business: Elizabeth Inchbald, Lady Cahir, Sir Thomas Lawrence, and the Aftermath of the Art of the Actress

References