Joanna Baillie Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Maureen A. Dowd

Critical Essay by Maureen A. Dowd

SOURCE: Dowd, Maureen A. “‘By the Delicate Hand of a Female’: Melodramatic Mania and Joanna Baillie's Spectacular Tragedies.” European Romantic Review 9, no. 4 (fall 1998): 469-500.

In the following essay, Dowd shows how and why Baillie distanced herself from German Sturm und Drang melodrama even while using its techniques—especially those of grand spectacle, the depiction of the lower and middle classes, and the use of moral pedagogy, The critic also notes the parallels between Baillie's works and those of Friedrich Schiller.

Recent criticism of Joanna Baillie has traced the similarities between Baillie's comprehensive 1798 “Introductory Discourse” to the first volume of her Series of Plays on the Passions and Wordsworth's celebrated “Preface” to the Lyrical Ballads.¹ Discussing Wordsworth's aesthetic theory in the context of popular German drama, David Simpson argues that the British critical debate over Kotzebue constructed Wordsworth as a “domesticated alternative to the same potential whose negative...
(read more)