Books by Elizabeth Maddock Dillon

Elizabeth Maddock Dillon explores how new publics were convened and contested around the riotous theatre scenes of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, from England to the Caribbean to the early United States. In the process, she develops a capacious account of performance, aesthetics, and modernity.

In a sweeping reassessment of early American literature, The Gender of Freedom explores the workings of the literary public sphere-from its colonial emergence through the antebellum flourishing of sentimentalism-and places representations of and by women at the center rather than the margin of the public sphere and the politics of liberalism.