Description
Book SynopsisThe ten essays in
Literature and the Arts explore the intermedial plenitude of eighteenth-century English culture, honoring the memory of James Anderson Winn, whose work demonstrated how seeing that interplay of the arts and literature was essential to a full understanding of Restoration and eighteenth-century English culture. Scenery, machinery, music, dance, and texts transformed one another, both enriching and complicating generic distinctions. Artists were alive to the power of the arts to reflect and shape reality, and their audience was quick to turn to the arts as performative pleasures and critical lenses through which to understand a changing world. This collection's eminent authors discuss estate design, musicalized theater, the visual spectacle of musical performance, stage machinery and set designs, the social uses of painting and singing, drama’s reflection of a transformed military infrastructure, and the arts of memory and of laughter.
Table of Contents Acknowledgments vii
Introduction
ANNA BATTIGELLI
1 Laughter from on High: The Arts of Contempt in
Restoration England
STEVEN N. ZWICKER
2 Staging Davenant; or, Macbeth, the Musical
AMANDA EUBANKS WINKLER
3 The Arts of Memory in Absalom and Achitophel:
Dryden’s Response to Milton and Marvell
PAUL HAMMOND
4 Peacocks and Rainbows: Visual Spectacle and
Allegorical Performance in Albion and Albanius
ANDREW R. WALKLING
5 “The Dyrham Decades”: The Cultural Connections
of an English Country House, 1690–1720
DAVID HOPKINS
6 Domenico Scarlatti: “Jesting with Art”
CEDRIC D. REVERAND II
7 Queen Anne’s Other Women
PAULA R. BACKSCHEIDER
8 Anne Donnellan: Friend of the Arts
ELLEN T. HARRIS
9 Responding to Emma in 1816: Reviewers, Readers,and “Opinions”
PETER SABOR
10 Elizabeth Rivers and Christopher Smart:
Eighteenth-Century Poetry across Time and Form
MELISSA SCHOENBERGER
Selected Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index
