Diagnosing the (American) Crisis in Foote’s The Cozeners and Burney’s Evelina

Abstract

This chapter contributes to the ongoing scholarly reassessment of the so called American Crisis, which was actually experienced — and in many ways is still best understood — as a global crisis in imperial affairs. It discusses Edmund Burke's speech “On American Taxation,” delivered on April 19, 1774, and Frances Burney's debut novel Evelina (1778). However, the primary case study is Samuel Foote's neglected comic masterpiece The Cozeners (1774). One of the goals of the chapter is to show how the theater afforded playwrights especially complex representational practices with which to render the far-flung coordinates of Britain's globally stretched imperial social formation visible. At the theater, Londoners learned how to view the empire from the perspective of the Indies mentality; and they sought to make sense of current events within this global analytic framework.