This edited collection examines assumptions about what a lost play is and how it can be talked about; how lost plays can be reconstructed, particularly when they use narratives already familiar to playgoers; and how lost plays can force us ...

In 2012, Harvard University said it could no longer afford the high cost of academic journal subscriptions. The aim of this paper is to discuss the pressures, opportunities and costs facing research library acquisitions budgets in Australia. It seeks to understand how libraries are coping with resource issues and what strategies they are deploying to overcome their fiscal challenges. The findings are presented of a study into the pressures, opportunities, and costs facing research library budgets in Australia. A qualitative research methodology was used to undertake the study. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with representatives involved at the highest level of library resource allocation from their respective universities. The study provides discussion on how libraries are coping with resource issues and what strategies they are deploying to overcome their fiscal challenges.

Aphra Behn’s The History of the Nun; or the Fair Vow Breaker (1689) was the originary text of at least five more versions throughout the eighteenth century. This lurid tale of broken vows, excessive desire and shocking violence encodes within it a sharp critique of patriarchal ideology. By examining the subsequent versions through their “adaptive events—textual moments created by adaptors to explain the protagonists motivations—it becomes clear that subsequent texts try, in various ways, to simplify, clarify, extenuate, pathologize or in some way explain and contain Behn’s plot, even as they cannot help but replicate the sharp critique of patriarchy which the original tale encodes.

Passionate motifs—usually the passion of love and the dangerous consequences of hyper-emotionality—pervade Eliza Haywood’s early novellas. This repetition of emotionality and the sustained analytical voice which comments on the episodes of her fictional stories create a kind of emotional philosophy. There are clear rules for emotional living in Haywood’s texts, and in her works the passions provide structure for an eighteenth-century notion of individuality. By examining "Reflections on the Various Effects of Love" (1726) and "Life’s Progress through the Passions; or the Adventures of Natura" (1748), Hultquist demonstrates that, over this twenty-two year span, Haywood creates a discourse for and a theory of the passions, an authentic way of living passionately, in a fictional narrative form.

Hultquist reviews Rebecca Tierney-Hynes's "Novel Minds: Philosophers and Romance Readers, 1680-1740" (Palgrave 2012) and Kathleen Lubey's "Excitable Imaginations: Eroticism and Reading in Britain, 1660-1760" (Bucknell, 2012).

The conversation surrounding the importance, significance, and use of the passions reached a kind of fevered pitch in the eighteenth century, the supposed Age of Reason. By the early eighteenth century, the passions were generally understood as something to be governed by reason. Another philosophy of thought on controlling the passions existed: ordering the emotions through emotional organization rather than “reasonable” control. The work of Eliza Haywood—a prolific eighteenth-century author, actress, playwright, translator, and publisher—is a particularly fertile place to examine feeling in fictional form. Haywood provides a different framework for understanding the passions—that the passions themselves, rather than reason, bring order to the passions. This understanding of the passions places reason and feeling in slightly different terms, terms that are far less hierarchical than has been assumed. This chapter argues that Eliza Haywood’s discussions of emotion in her fiction theorizes a particular mode of ordering the passions, not through reason, but through emotion, a dialogue that is in conversation with the sustained emotional discourse of how to shape emotion in the eighteenth century.

Hultquist reviews Bonnie Nelson and Catherine Burroughs, eds. "Teaching British Women Playwrights of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century." (MLA, 2010) and Pilar Cuder-Dominguez. "Stuart Women Playwrights, 1613-1713." (Ashgate, 2011)