Deaf Education and the Rise of English Melodrama. Issue 1 (1st April 2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Robinson, Terry F.
• Is Part Of: Essays in romanticism. Volume 29:Issue 1(2022)
• Page Start: 1
• Page End: 31
• Publication Date: 2022-04-01
• Subjects: Romanticism -- Periodicals; 820.9145
• DOI: 10.3828/eir.2022.29.1.2
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2049-6699

Abstract

Abstract : This essay links the prevalence of nonverbal characters in English melodrama to eighteenth-century deaf education and Enlightenment linguistic anthropology. It reveals how Thomas Holcroft's Deaf and Dumb (1801) and A Tale of Mystery (1802) draw upon the instructional practices of the Abbé de l'Épée, the founder of the first free school for the deaf; upon the origin of language debate; and upon the idea that gestural communication had the power to resolve linguistic conflict. Analyzing these associations advances insight into the rise of English melodrama, complicates notions of its inherent conservatism, and suggests that nonverbal signs, as they were practiced by deaf people and performed by actors on stage, provided one of Romanticism's most salient points of imagined access to expressive truth—a truth Holcroft believed to be key to social and political reform.