Women Frontstage: Female Polemics and the American Revolutio

The focus of the international workshop with attendees from Austria, Croatia, France, Germany, Israel, Lithuania, Romania, and Spain will be Susanna Rowson’s comic opera Slaves in Algiers; or, a Struggle for Freedom (1794). Its political background features the capture of American sea travelers by Barbary pirates. The text will be introduced by US-American specialist Marion Rust from the University of Kentucky at Lexington and the papers will then proceed from Rowson’s play to broaden the historical and cultural context and to situate the text within a corpus of related works by such dramatists as Mercy Otis Warren, Judith Sargent Murray, Mary Carr, and Sarah Pogson. All of these writers challenge traditional power relations of comedies by using polemical humor. The workshop therefore aims at revisiting largely forgotten female dramatists who as comic polemics found a way to participate in the political debates surrounding the American Revolution.