Eighteenth-century Theory Research Articles

Séances, “Sperrits,” and Self-Playing Accordions

The accordion was the stalwart staple of spiritualist encounters in Victorian London. Introduced into séances by the Scottish American Daniel Dunglas Home (1833–86), the most celebrated medium of the era, the instrument was typically used to produce music without the visible aid of a performer (what I call the “spirit accordian”). This article seeks to explain why the accordion came to capture the imagination of the nineteenth-century spiritualist community. It does so by reconstructing the auditory culture in which the instrument was embedded, relying on scientific writings, the popular press, and the sonic experiences of both the spiritualists, who heard the spirit accordion as emitting the ethereal tones of other worlds, and the skeptics, who described the same sounds as grating squeaks. Linking the instrument and its role in the séance to eighteenth-century theories of neurophysiology, the article traces the spirit accordion’s various musical predecessors, arguing that Home’s canny selection of the instrument to represent the next world reflected the intersection of specific cultural signifiers.

Schattenriss (Silhouette)

The lexeme Schattenriss (silhouette) refers to an object that is suggestive of why materiality matters to Goethe’s philosophical thought. It touches on several intellectual and aesthetic areas, including semiotics (natural versus arbitrary signs), art, physiognomy, anthropology, color theory, and epistemology. A popular reproductive artform of the late eighteenth century, the silhouette entered into Goethe’s own collecting and artistic practices already in the 1770s. Collaboration with Johann Caspar Lavater (1741–1801) extended the significance of the silhouette profile into the scientific arena and built on Enlightenment visual agendas. The Schattenriss is also connected with eighteenth-century theories of mimesis and representation that concern related terms like Umriss (outline, contour) and also appear in Goethe’s aesthetic writings. In his later work on color theory and the art-making activities of the Johanna Schopenhauer salon, however, Goethe focuses on the shadowy interior and the colorful shades of the shadow rather than the static line of the Umriss to take the silhouette into striking new scientific and aesthetic territory.

Dramatic Justice: Trial By Theatre In The Age Of The French Revolution by Yann Robert

Reviewed by: Dramatic Justice: Trial By Theatre In The Age Of The French Revolution by Yann Robert Annelle Curulla DRAMATIC JUSTICE: TRIAL BY THEATRE IN THE AGE OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. By Yann Robert. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018; pp. 344. In the fateful winter of 1793, the National Convention paused their unprecedented trial of Louis XVI in order to halt performances of a popular play, L’Ami des lois. As Yann Robert argues in his fascinating new book, this is no mere irony of history but rather the culminating moment of a much longer process. Dramatic Justice charts “the growing (con)fusion between theater and justice” from the mid-eighteenth century through to the early days of the Directory (3). The past decade of work on eighteenth-century theatre and drama has amply accounted for a range of innovations and reforms of its material and economic practices, as well as in the literary, philosophical, and cultural dimensions of theatre. Robert fruitfully extends this interdisciplinary inquiry into the legal realm, which witnessed a “parallel evolution” to that of theatre (19). Robert argues that the courtroom, like the stage, offered a prime site for reform and experimentation, but it also triggered antitheatrical anxieties as new forms of legal representation emerged. By carefully positioning itself between theatre studies, legal studies, and French Revolutionary historical studies, Robert’s study raises important questions about who makes and enforces law, how disputes are exposed and adjudicated, and how offenses can be punished or redressed. Part 1 introduces the concept of “judicial theatre,” which Robert defines as “public spectacles that re-enact contemporary events on stage so as to expose, judge, and punish a transgression” (3). Chapter 1 focuses on reenactment as a central characteristic of judicial theatre. Through a brilliant analysis of Denis Diderot’s drama Le Fils naturel, and its accompanying treatise Entretiens sur le Fils naturel, Robert exposes two competing theories of reenactment in Diderot’s texts. In the first, represented by the paternal character Lysimond, reenactment functions as a historical reconstruction that enshrines one authoritative perspective—the Father’s—ad infinitum. In the second theory, represented by the “natural son” Dorval, reenactment is a collective effort of equals who debate and revise the narrative of events. Robert suggests these two theories of reenactment are also reflected in judicial theatre after 1750. Chapter 2 considers satire as a variety of judicial theatre, since it uses the stage as an alternate site for justice. According to Robert, the eighteenth-century debate over satire reveals that there was little consensus over the legitimacy of its denunciations, judgments, and punishments. Writers from Palissot to Rousseau interpretated satire’s civic powers with enthusiasm or dread, revealing, as [End Page 581] Robert suggests, the ways in which judicial theatre raised crucial questions over who may judge and whether communities may participate in judgment. Part 2 pivots from stage to courtroom to examine how and why theatrical thinking shaped efforts to reform the ancien régime’s justice system. Chapter 3 examines jurisprudence, pamphlets, and other sources to show how new modes of legal practice amounted to a theatricalization of justice. In the push to incorporate new procedures for criminal trials, reformers moved away from inquisitional modes in which judges wrote a single, reconstructive narrative and towards accusatorial modes of procedure, which required lawyers to present two dueling narratives before a judge. According to Robert, this practice gave rise to a growing ambivalence towards the legal profession, even as reformers encouraged lawyers speaking “as” clients to take cues from professional actors. Chapter 4 continues to explore antitheatrical concerns with respect to judges. No longer embodiments of royal authority, judges resembled spectators who weighed lawyers’ contrasting arguments using reason and emotion. Robert connects fears of judges’ diminished authority to an even deeper fear of “theatrocracy,” Plato’s term for a state ruled by the whims of the crowd-as-audience. According to Robert, the influence of those who expressed such antitheatrical anxieties explains in part why the French system still includes a mix of accusatory and inquisitional modes, with the latter acting as prophylactic against the former. Chapter 5 connects antitheatrical thinking to patriarchy. Robert shows how the legal...

Archival Relations: Women and Regional Theater in the Kathleen Barker Archive

Archival Relations:Women and Regional Theater in the Kathleen Barker Archive Fiona Ritchie (bio) Keywords Eighteenth century theater history, women's theatre history, Kathleen Barker, archives, women's writing, women's and gender studies For the last few years, I have been working on a study of women and regional theater in Britain and Ireland in the long eighteenth century.1 The last comprehensive research on provincial theater in this period was undertaken by Sybil Rosenfeld, whose Strolling Players and Drama in the Provinces, 1660–1765 was published over eighty years ago in 1939. A new study of the subject is therefore long overdue, but the topic is so vast that perhaps I am a fool to grapple with it. However, I take inspiration from the late and much-missed theater historian Jane Moody, who was working on this topic when she died in 2011.2 She would have produced a brilliant book on regional theater, and it is a huge loss to academia that she did not get the chance to do so. The focus of my own project on theater outside London in the long eighteenth century is gender. Extensive archival research across Britain and Ireland will allow me to uncover the important contributions made by women to regional performance culture, not just in terms of acting but also with regard to management and other types of off-stage labor. When I began this undertaking, I felt overwhelmed at the scale of the task ahead of me and unsure where to start. So my first port of call was Bristol, my hometown. I reasoned that I at least knew something of the city, its culture, history, and geography that could help me orient myself. This turned out to be a brilliant plan. Bristol, of course, has a rich theatrical history. The present day Old Vic began life as the city's Theatre Royal in the middle of the eighteenth century and is "the longest continuously working theater in the English-speaking world."3 Furthermore, the University of Bristol has rich archival holdings related to performance (both in Bristol and elsewhere) in its Theatre Collection, which was founded in 1951 to serve the first university drama department in the United Kingdom.4 One of their holdings is the Kathleen Barker Archive. Barker lived from 1925 to 1991, and research into theater history was her life's work. The collection is described in detail by Christopher Robinson in a short chapter of a festschrift devoted to Barker, published in 1994: Basically the archive comprises eighty stout arch-files, each one containing between 600 and 800 quarto or A4 sheets, most of them double-sided, on [End Page 131] which virtually everything that ever appeared in print, in newspapers and theater journals, relating to provincial entertainment has been painstakingly reproduced, mainly by a manual typewriter.5 Barker's interests in provincial theater ranged beyond Bristol and beyond the eighteenth century. She was awarded her doctorate by the University of Leicester in 1982 for a thesis entitled "Provincial Entertainment 1840–1870: The Performing Arts in Five Provincial Towns," a study which encompassed performance culture in Nottingham, Sheffield, Newcastle, Brighton, and Bristol. Fifteen folders in the Barker archive contain research undertaken for this project. Barker's hometown remained a key focus of her research, however, and the collection contains material she amassed in writing books on theater in the city, The Theatre Royal Bristol, 1766–1966: Two Centuries of Stage History (1974) and Bristol at Play: Five Centuries of Live Entertainment (1976).6 Robinson makes clear the extent of these resources: "Her authoritative history of the Theatre Royal, Bristol, from 1766 to 1966, is related in 267 pages, but the reference material she assembled covering this period fills twenty-four files, or something in excess of 16,000 pages" (p. 14). Furthermore, Barker's definition of entertainment was capacious. Bristol at Play includes discussion of musical concerts, circus, puppet shows, pantomime, equestrian entertainment, menageries, dioramas, and so on. Her archive is therefore of great use to scholars working across centuries, geographical locations, and types of performance. My work with the Barker archive has primarily been concerned with a specific aspect of Bristol theater...

Editor's Note

Editor's Note Marion Rust For the second issue of 2021, we have many exciting awards to announce. The Early American Literature Book Prize for 2020 has been awarded to Lindsay DiCuirci, an associate professor of English at UMBC (the University of Maryland, Baltimore County), for Colonial Revivals: The Nineteenth Century Lives of Early American Books, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2019. A full statement regarding this award can be found on page 323 of this issue. Congratulations, Professor DiCuirci! The Modern Language Association Forum on Early American Literature has awarded its 2019 Richard Beale Davis Prize, which honors the best essay to appear in Early American Literature in a single year, to two cowinners: Reed Gochberg, for "Circulating Objects: Crèvecoeur's 'Curious Book' and the American Philosophical Society Cabinet," and Ana Schwartz, for "Mercy as Well as Extremity": Forts, Fences, and Fellow Feeling in New England Settlement." Both essays appeared in EAL 54, no. 2 (2019). A full statement regarding this award can be found on page 325 of this issue. Congratulations, Professors Gochberg and Schwartz! Congratulations are also due to Ajay Kumar Batra, doctoral candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania, on winning the American Literature Society's yearly 1921 Award for Best Essay in American Literature (untenured category) for "Reading with Conviction: Abraham Johnstone and the Poetics of the Dead End." This essay appeared in Early American Literature's special issue "Beyond Recovery" (55, no. 2), guest edited by Professors Steffi Dippold and Lauren Coats. Thanks to the ALS for sponsoring this award, to the guest editors for including it in their special issue, and to Ajay Kumar Batra for his fine work. The EAL issue here is hard to sum up. Its four essays in the field of Black studies address crowd action (Betsy Erkkila), multispecies narrative (Kyle Keeler), scholarly projection (Rio Bergh), and embodied Black knowledge (Samantha Pinto). Two other contributions correct long-standing [End Page 327] misappraisals of key texts in the field: early seventeenth-century iconoclast Thomas Morton's May Day poem (Robert Hudson Vincent) and the anonymous post-Revolutionary "Panther Captivity" narrative (Alex Gergely). A revisionary assessment of fictional interventions in eighteenthcentury theories of consciousness (Matthew Rebhorn), a teasing out of literary nationalist satirical employments of the British Gothic (Ellen Bulford Welch), a review of new methodologies in the study of natural history (Elizabeth Polcha) and a cowritten twenty-first-century "beast fable" in the voice of a raven and a bobolink (Chi-Ming Yang and Sarah Rivett) round out the list. Taken together, these works overlap in their engagements with animal studies, Black studies, cognitive literary studies, gender studies, genre studies, natural history studies, settler colonial studies, textual criticism, Wampanoag studies, and more. This issue attests to the range, as well as quality, of work now going on in the capacious field of early American literary studies. I commend it to your attention. [End Page 328] Copyright © 2021 The University of North Carolina Press

Invisible agents in translation history: Censors and actors in performed drama of eighteenth-century England

ABSTRACT In dialogue with the social turn in translation studies, this article uncovers the work of invisible agents shaping the translation of performed drama in eighteenth-century England. Unlike other genres, performed drama was subject to a system of state censorship that shaped translation practices in ways that have not been fully accounted for by translation historiography. Using Carlo Goldoni as a case study, the article reveals the intervention of censors and actors in shaping Goldoni’s translations, making visible for the first time the central role they played as ‘rewriters’ in English theatrical culture. In reading translation through the material conditions of eighteenth-century theatre, an argument is made for a re-evaluation of performed drama in the historiographical account of eighteenth-century translation in English.

The Problem of Reflection in Eighteenth-Century Projectile Theories of Light

This paper explores the mechanical models elaborated by projectile theorists throughout the eighteenth century to explain the reflection of light. Influenced by Isaac Newton’s Opticks, these projectile theorists proposed that repulsion was the cause of reflection. My purpose is to show that their models were not unified and lacked a deeper understanding of the origin of repulsive powers. This analysis illustrates how a simple optical phenomenon was not easy for eighteenth-century theorists to explain, even when the projectile theory of light was prominent among natural philosophers.

Review of the London Stage Database

The London Stage Database is an open-access and open-source website that digitises the performance records contained in the print volumes of the London Stage, published in the 1960s. The database's flexible search function and intuitive interface open up new directions in research and will change the way we think about eighteenth-century theatre.

Epopeia e romance em conflito? O feliz independente (1779), de Teodoro de Almeida

Resumo: A análise da narrativa híbrida O feliz independente (1779), de Teodoro de Almeida, revela como a poesia épica em Portugal já estava num processo de renovação perto do final do século XVIII, colocando pistas para o romance histórico do Romantismo. As reflexões metaliterárias do mesmo autor e o discurso poetológico que acompanhou a publicação mostram o status volátil de alguns paradigmas do gênero épico, por exemplo, o uso do verso, os feitos heroicos com relevância para uma coletividade ou a conceção do herói. Para os contemporâneos, a obra de Almeida é um “poema épico em prosa”, hoje em dia classificamo-la como “romance”. Neste trabalho destacam-se as características épicas e romanescas de O feliz independente, tendo como pano de fundo os debates poetológicos do século XVIII e as teses sobre os gêneros literários de Mikhail Bakhtin.

Should the End of a Phrase be Emphasized? An Essay in Musical Prosody

ABSTRACT For understanding eighteenth-century notions of “singing” on an instrument, modern standards of “classical” performance can be a source of confusion rather than clarification. Rather than simply calling for legato or vibrato, such notions tapped into a pool of ideas concerned with essential commonalities between music and language. Song, as understood in the eighteenth century, is the anthropological origin of music and language, a primitive vocal expression of emotion carried into verbal speech through its musical properties (prosody) and understood as working similarly in musical melody. At the same time, a trove of terms used in music theory—such as “rhythm,” “meter,” “accent,” or “phrase”—is concerned not with language (as is often claimed), but with the same intersection of music and speech, a gray area between these realms. It is in this field that the eighteenth-century theory of text setting operates. It can be said that, from an eighteenth-century perspective, every piece of instrumental music is a “Song without Words,” having all the music-prosodic features—accents, lines, phrases, even rhymes—with which the vocal composer would respond to a specific text. Such a perspective can illuminate and perhaps answer some questions that performers (especially historically informed performers) often struggle with and are forced to answer with theories indebted to more recent traditions, such as those associated with Schenker and Riemann.

Paradoks o konwencji: «Refleksje krytyczne» Jean-Baptiste’a Dubosa

W 1719 roku Jean-Baptiste Dubos opublikował olbrzymią rozprawę o sztuce Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture, w której zaproponował nowy rodzaj refleksji o tym, co artystyczne. Choć czerpał z teorii starożytników, to na szeroką skalę wprowadził do swojego dzieła nowoczesną, zwiastującą sensualizm perspektywę osobistego odbioru i indywidualnego zachwytu. Polskim teatrologom Dubos znany jest niemal wyłącznie dzięki artykułowi Zbigniewa Raszewskiego Partytura teatralna, przez co sprowadza się jego idee głównie do rozważań o możliwości stworzenia zapisu gry scenicznej. Tymczasem osiemnastowieczny teoretyk fascynował się istnieniem takiej partytury o tyle, o ile widział w niej narzędzie do wskazania aktorowi kierunku poszukiwań, której celem nie była utopijna wierność autorskiemu zamierzeniu, ale szansa na analizę wolności własnej i poszukiwania prawdy sztuki. Artykuł omawia główne strategie narracyjne zastosowane przez Jean-Baptiste’a Dubosa w traktacie, prezentuje główny obszar teatralnych zainteresowań autora i jego wyobrażenie o zastosowaniu maski w teatrze antycznym i w komedii dell’arte. Szkicuje związki koncepcji księdza Dubosa z osiemnastowieczną teorią i praktyką paryskiego teatru.

Paolucci Reading Caldara and Handel: Music Analysis in Eighteenth-Century Italy

Giuseppe Paolucci's Arte pratica di contrappunto (1765–72) is a collection of analyses of forty-two compositions from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. It offers insights into eighteenth-century practices of music analysis as well as into historical concepts of counterpoint and fugue. Two analytical readings by Paolucci are translated and commented upon in this essay. Paolucci's analysis of Antonio Caldara's motet Peccavi super numerum is valuable for its references to rhetoric and the visual arts. The analysis of Handel's fugue "Then shall I teach thy ways" (from the Chandos Anthem HWV 248) exemplifies the high esteem in which contemporary writers and composers held Handel's compositional techniques, which Paolucci describes meticulously, bar by bar. Paolucci's reading of Handel's fugue, which is similar to Italian partimento fugues of that time, also provides material for the still-unwritten history of eighteenth-century Italian fugal theory.

Getting Lost: Proprioception and Thinking in the Gothic Novel

ABSTRACTDrawing on recent phenomenological theories in addition to Paul Henri Thiry’s eighteenth-century theory of thought as movement, this essay argues that Ann Radcliffe’s novels present perception as a process of actively navigating one’s surroundings. Characters’ higher-level mental operations are similarly grounded in corporeal acts of making their way through environments. Appreciating characters’ processes of perceiving and thinking integrates the natural and supernatural aspects of Radcliffe’s novels, which are often treated separately. Additionally, attending to character’s and reader’s acts of navigating sensory confusion foregrounds the moment-to-moment experience of reading gothic novels more effectively than the framework of suspense.

Forum: Canon versus "The Great Unread"

Forum:Canon versus "The Great Unread" Birgit Tautz and Patricia Anne Simpson When we embarked on editing the Goethe Yearbook, we brainstormed ideas about formats for disseminating research that would usefully complement the stellar articles that appear annually. Our interest turned to the forum, a robust format that has fostered lively debate elsewhere (e.g., Eighteenth Century Theory and Interpretation) and has recently been popularized by our colleagues at the German Quarterly. Naturally, we zeroed in on a topic that is still underrepresented in the Yearbook but that has begun to alter the ways in which we approach the study of Goethe and, more broadly, the eighteenth century—within our comparatively small field in North America, as well as in Germany and in adjacent disciplines invested in the period (e.g., comparative literature and comparative cultural studies, genre studies, English, Atlantic studies, and history). We are, of course, speaking of Digital Humanities (DH). In the process of identifying experts in the field, we discovered that a few years ago graduate programs in German (at Yale, the University of Chicago, and Konstanz) had devoted a short course to the topic that inspired the title of our inaugural forum. As we approached potential contributors, we posed a series of questions, intended to spark not direct answers, but to serve as an impulse for reflection: What is the canon? How do we define it and how has it been reenvisioned beyond DH? What is the relationship between "mining" thousands of texts through algorithms and scholarship "merely" based on the interpretation of select literary works? What are the consequences of digitizing primary materials? How do DH methodologies and analytical practices enhance and/or endanger the study of the canon? How does "close reading" versus "distant reading" affect the legacy of canonical authors and their impact on the construction of national literary historiography in the nineteenth century? What is at stake for the discipline of literary study—for the act of (close) reading—when we ask the question about the canon versus the "great unread"? Nine colleagues who are engaged in the theory and practice of DH scholarship responded to our call. The scope of their work is impressive, providing detailed yet suggestive overviews of DH methodologies, insights into the importance of DH and its ability to recuperate historically marginalized writers, case studies of temporary canonicity, and challenges to canonical approaches to the Goethezeit. In framing the debate, we kept in mind the larger context of German studies, while assuming an uncontested relevance of literature and textual studies, certainly among the readers of the Goethe Yearbook. And while we [End Page 187] recognized the pitfalls of posing canonical literature as "read" in opposition to a virtually boundless spectrum of texts that can be analyzed only as data, we hoped to prompt a less polarized discussion about the imagined impact of DH and "computational criticism" on our field. We wanted to create a section that allows scholars—whether they are newcomers or well-versed in DH, interested in or deeply skeptical about data—to glimpse the innovative field's rich opportunities, its first instances of obsolescence, even its evident shortfalls; our goal is to allow our readers to decide for themselves whether to read broadly, which directions to pursue further, or whether to disregard the field completely. We invite continuous engagement with the contributions, not to succumb to a trend, but to continue the dialogue. The following essays impressively show that our aim for open discussions was spot-on. The contributors not only address ways in which DH can broaden an understanding of our field, but they also identify new challenges that arise; quite a few returned to the original meaning of "the great unread" in Margaret Cohen's formulation, namely the fact that canon formation has always implied a curtailing of tradition (as opposed to the texts produced in any given period). Each contribution reveals, in unique ways, not only that possible definitions of and approaches to DH are about as manifold as its projects and practitioners, but that the field has begun what we may call its own historicization; it now encompasses digital preservation, humanistic inquiry about digital objects (text, image, space, networks...

ASECS at 50: Interview with Joseph Roach

ASECS at 50:Interview with Joseph Roach Terry F. Robinson (bio) and Joseph Roach Joseph Roach is Sterling Professor of Theater and Professor of English, Emeritus, at Yale University. A theatre historian, stage director, and performance studies scholar, Roach is the author of The Player's Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Delaware, 1985; Michigan, 1993), which was recognized by the Barnard Hewitt Award in Theatre History; Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (Columbia, 1996), which was awarded the James Russell Lowell Prize from the MLA and the Joe A. Callaway Prize for the Best Book on Drama or Theater from NYU; and It (Michigan, 2007). He is also editor, with Janelle Reinelt, of Critical Theory and Performance (Michigan, 1992, 2nd ed. revised 2007), and, most recently, with Margaret K. Powell, of A Cultural History of Hair in the Age of Enlightenment (Bloomsbury, 2019). His essays on theatre and performance history have appeared in journals such as Eighteenth-Century Studies; PMLA; MLQ; Shakespeare Survey; Modern Drama; Theatre Journal; Theatre Survey; The Drama Review; and Theater; as well as in edited collections such as The Global Eighteenth Century; The First Actresses; Bluestockings Displayed; Henry Fielding: Novelist, Playwright, Journalist, Magistrate; From the Royal to the Republican Body; and Politics, Transgression, and Representation at the Court of Charles II. Roach has chaired the Department of Theatre at Sweet Briar College, the Performing Arts Department at Washington University in St. Louis, the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Theatre at Northwestern University, the Department of Performance Studies at NYU, and the Theater Studies Program in Yale College. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Antiquarian Society, he was Principal Investigator on a sequence of three grants from [End Page 181] the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that funded the World Performance Project at Yale and the Performance Studies Working Group (2003–16). He is the recipient of a Lifetime Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Society for Theatre Research and the Oscar Brockett Outstanding Teacher Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education; and he has directed over fifty plays, operas, and musicals. In 2012 he gave the James L. Clifford Lecture; in 2013–14 he served as President of ASECS. Terry Robinson: First, let me say that it is an honor to speak with you as a leading scholar of theatre and performance studies for this ASECS 50th Anniversary interview series. In addition to your many scholarly accomplishments, you are a widely respected colleague and mentor, and I have no doubt that anyone who opens this ECS volume and sees your name will be eager to read your reflections on your career and on your work in long eighteenth-century studies. Joseph Roach: You are very kind to say that, and to do this interview. Robinson: Not at all. It's a true pleasure. I thought we might begin at the beginning? Roach: Sounds good. Robinson: Your initial foray into theatre began as an undergraduate at the University of Kansas, where you acted mainly in modern and contemporary plays. You went on to earn a master's in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama in the U.K. and a Ph.D. in theatre arts at Cornell, which included theory as well as practice. Since graduate school, you have directed plays from every period, and have taught an introductory survey of theatre history that your students called "From Caves to Cats." Given such wide-ranging interests, what is it that drew you—and continues to draw you—to Restoration and eighteenth-century theatre? Roach: If you care for the theatre at all, you love eighteenth-century theatre. Robinson: I agree, of course! But why do you think so? Roach: Because the brilliance of the performers so thoroughly irradiated the artifacts of the period that they still glow. You can read by their light. The many treasures left behind include but are not limited to plays, libretti, scores, prompt books, prologues, epilogues, notated dances, paintings, prints, costumes, machinery, memoirs, reviews, and eyewitness accounts. Other ages of theatre have good sources, but none can produce a diarist who excels Pepys, a portraitist who rivals Reynolds, or critics who can...

Musical Portraits: The Composition of Identity in Contemporary and Experimental Music by Joshua S. Walden

Reviewed by: Musical Portraits: The Composition of Identity in Contemporary and Experimental Music by Joshua S. Walden Elizabeth Hoover Musical Portraits: The Composition of Identity in Contemporary and Experimental Music. By Joshua S. Walden. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. [xiii, 184 p. ISBN 9780190653507 (hardback), $74; ISBN 9780190653521 (e-book), varies; also available in Oxford Scholarship Online.] Figures, music examples, bibliography, endnotes, index. Musical Portraits: The Composition of Identity in Contemporary and Experimental Music complements literature by Joshua S. Walden on musical representation and identity through the exploration of musical portraiture, "a genre of compositions that operate as musical evocations of aspects of individual identities in the manner of portraits in the visual arts and literature" (p. 2). Walden pioneered the study of musical portraiture by discussing Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach in relation to eighteenth-century theories of portraiture in the visual arts, and correlations between music and painting ("Composing Character in Musical Portraits: Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and L'Aly Rupalich," Musical Quarterly 91, nos. 3–4 [Fall-Winter 2008]: 379–411; "What's in a Name? C. P. E. Bach and the Genres of the Character Piece and Musical Portrait," in Genre in Eighteenth-Century Music, ed. Anthony R. DelDonna [Ann Arbor, MI: Steglein Publishing, 2008], 111–38). In Musical Portraits, Walden contemporizes the discussion by extending his work on portraiture composed since 1950 initiated in "Representation and Musical Portraiture in the Twentieth Century" (in Representation in Western Music, ed. Joshua S. Walden [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013], 127–43), which focuses on compositions that challenge traditional modes of representation in parallel to, or inspired by, experiments in literature, painting, and multimedia. In the introduction, four chapters, and epilogue that make up the text, Walden investigates a series of case studies to demonstrate how contemporary musical portraiture constructs human identity and questions formations of the self for both artists and audience. Although quite brief and in no way comprehensive, the introduction, "Portraiture as a Musical Genre," highlights how portraiture has served as metaphor for internal identity. Walden establishes that the nature of twentieth-century portraiture represents this identity apart from mimesis and compares the roles of metaphor in portraiture and music. By calling on select theories of identity construction in postmodern performance, Walden emphasizes the social, performative, and hermeneutic construction of identity in contemporary musical portraiture. Walden explores four main types of musical portraiture, as indicated by the chapter titles: (1) "Musical and Literary Portraiture," (2) "Musical Portraits of Visual Artists," (3) "Listening in on Composers' Self-Portraits," and (4) "Celebrity, Music, and the Multimedia Portrait." To study the complex and multifaceted construction of identity in these types of portraiture, Walden depends on musical, literary, visual, and dramatic texts as evidence. His interpretive, cross-disciplinary analysis is accessible to readers across the humanities and is often enhanced by authoritative artist statements about the works. Mirroring the trajectory of abstract art in the twentieth century and portraiture's break from aesthetic realism outlined in the introduction, Musical Portraits, although often rooted in comparative studies of musical ekphrasis, departs from this approach to question who is represented in musical portraiture and the truthfulness of such representations. The first two chapters compare musical portraits of artists whose styles inspired composers, who name them [End Page 460] in the title. Chapter one analyzes the influence of Gertrude Stein's poetic insistence—gradually varied repetitions of linguistic motifs—on Virgil Thomson's musical portraiture and then turns to Stéphane "Mallarmé's complex ideas about the relationships between poetry and music" as enacted in Pierre Boulez's Pli selon pli: Portrait de Mallarmé (p. 37). Drawing from A. S. Byatt, Walden introduces these case studies by underlining a kinship between music and language that, as Byatt claims, both depend on time and "the unfolding of description" (p. 23) to reveal internal character. Byatt establishes this connection in opposition to the supposed stasis of visual art (painting), but curiously Walden does not probe the aesthetic question of what designates "a temporal art" (or also a "time art"), a much-debated question in the disciplines of music and painting (Jerrold Levinson, Musical Concerns: Essays in Philosophy of Music [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015]; Jonathan...

Reading Contagion: The Hazards of Reading in the Age of Print by Annika Mann

Reviewed by: Reading Contagion: The Hazards of Reading in the Age of Print by Annika Mann Travis Chi Wing Lau MANN, ANNIKA. Reading Contagion: The Hazards of Reading in the Age of Print. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2018. $45.00 hardcover. xi + 257 pp. In the face of a current global pandemic, Annika Mann's Reading Contagion offers a timely historical intervention into long-standing scholarly debates about contagion as a bodily phenomenon and concept metaphor. Rather than "collapsing contagion 'as a figure' and contagion as a 'real disease'" (7), Mann turns instead to New Materialist approaches, which reframe contagion in terms of how it exposes the interconnections between human and non-human actors and the precarious networks [End Page 217] of exchange that they share. Mann also complicates the more presentist, often ahistorical quality of New Materialist narratives about the politics of animate matter by recovering the eighteenth century as a cultural moment when contagious discourses were being radically renegotiated. The typical consignment of the eighteenth century to a "noticeably static, and often negative, position" (8) has enabled theorists to flatten the Enlightenment to a period of increasing medicalization and pathology that culminates in the statewide public health programs and sanitation projects of the nineteenth century. Yet, for Mann, eighteenth-century theories of contagion complicated any easy distinctions between "human bodies and nonhuman media and objects, as well as between diseased and healthy bodies and spaces" (11). One of the central theories of contagion in this period is what Mann terms "reading contagion" or the capacity for the act of reading to "propagate embodied collectives and facilitate large-scale epidemics" through its affective and physiological effects on readers (12-13). Such capacity, Mann underscores, politicized reading in the eighteenth century. Mann joins other scholars of eighteenth-century literature and science like Tita Chico, Lucinda Cole, and Helen Thompson in arguing for the co-constitutive nature of medical and literary discourses on contagion. Recognizing that "interventions regarding health and disease were made equally by physicians, philosophers, and literary writers, who all argue that they possess particular access to the workings of the body and its surrounding world (in part because that body and its world are not fully known or made visible" (189-90), Mann decenters medical men in conventional histories of contagion by recuperating how literary writers shaped and propagated those very same theories. Through case studies of Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, Tobias Smollett, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Mary Shelley, Mann traces how "reading contagion" both recognizes the dangers of reading as the potential for passionate readerly identification and understands that identification as potentially reformatory or curative. Though seemingly contradictory, this theory of reading—while recognizing all textual objects as potentially threatening—enabled writers to justify their own literary experiments as salves for or prophylactics against other more toxic forms of writing. The transformative potential of the literary was thus always bound up with its potentially unbounded contagiousness: communities of readers constituted by the "viral" transmission of ideas and the literal circulation of print media in a burgeoning literary marketplace. Reading Contagion is organized around the four keywords "infection," "inoculation," "propagation," and "extinction," each referring to the approach of a single author to theorize a form of "reading contagion." Mann's introductory chapter, "Reading Contagion in Eighteenth-Century Medicine," grounds her argument in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century plague writings that get reworked through Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) as transformative, novelistic contact with the passions and matter of other bodies. This ambivalence between reading as "transformational contact" and as risky exposure is echoed in the following chapter on Alexander Pope's Dunciad in Four Books (1743), which similarly imagines print culture as epidemic outbreak but does not absolve Pope's own work from such "toxic materialization" (50, 54). Tobias Smollett and William Blake, in the subsequent chapters, both attempt to contain and transform the contagious potential of proliferating print media: the former "inoculates" audiences by creating hybrid media forms like The History and Adventures of an Atom (1769) and The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker (1771) that are less virulently infectious (and thus less harmful), while the latter embraced "reading contagion...

Robert Burns and the United States of America: Poetry, Print, and Memory 17861866 by Arun Sood

MLR, .,   In this way—and impressively, given the amount of scholarly ink that has been spilled on this topic—Yahav advances understandings of both Richardson’s technique of ‘writing to the moment’ and his interactions with readers, such as Lady Bradshaigh, who proposed alternative endings to Clarissa. It is not (or not simply) that Richardson had a monomaniacal need to control interpretations of his works, but that the long-term process of judging, on the part of both characters and readers, was central to his literary project. Focusing also on musicological treatises, elocutionist writings, and aesthetic theory, Yahav demonstrates that duration was both individual and shared—based on patterns originating in the human body—in a manner that the novel genre was uniquely able to take advantage of. While the duration of a single reading is necessarily finite, collective engagement with a work endures. As she writes of Tristram Shandy’s deployment of patterns of embodied rhythm, ‘[a]s long as there are readers who can get Sterne’s rhythmic prose [. . .] qualitative duration will continue to be felt and human time will continue to endure’ (p. ). Feeling Time capably integrates a thorough understanding of eighteenth-century theories of temporality—from those of major figures such as Locke and Hume to less famliar figures such as the musicologist Roger North—with incisive readings of canonical novels to offer a new view of the particular purchase of the novel genre in the eighteenth century. While a variety of writers may have been concerned with the question of how we know time, it was through novels that readers could not only contemplate but also experience duration as a qualitative moment that offered an alternative to the relentless forward march of the clock. U  C, S B R S K Robert Burns and the United States of America: Poetry, Print, and Memory – . By A S. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. . viii+ pp. £.. ISBN ––––. Such is the international popularity of Burns Night that no one can doubt the global reach of Robert Burns, especially in places touched by the Scottish diaspora. But what will astonish readers of Robert Burns and the United States of America is the extent to which the poet’s name and words were visible in the early decades of the American republic. ose opposed to slavery cited his works in defence of their cause, and so did those who propagated it. He was invoked by Poe, Emerson, Whitman, and Twain; and, as Arun Sood reveals in a highly informative subchapter on ‘James Lowell and American Vernacular Verse’ (pp. –), he was the model on which many less familiar writers attempted to create an American dialect writing tradition. It is a great strength of this book that it does not treat the question of reception in a unidirectional way, preferring instead to chart the ways in which Burns both drew from and contributed to the emerging idea of America. Sood’s study does an impressive job of charting the different forms of exchange that connected Burns before and aer his death to a country he had never seen at first hand. roughout,  Reviews Sood reads a diverse body of texts by the light of memory studies and transnationalism : two theories which allow him to emphasize the movement of Burns’s work across borders both temporal and national, where traditionally Burns has tended to be read through an overdetermined sense of his time and place. Among the source materials he draws on, we find (alongside more expected texts) pirated editions of Burns’s work, the ‘constitutional documents’ (p. ) of the Ku Klux Klan, and the proceedings of the first American ‘Burns Supper’ (p. ). e resulting picture is both panoramic and highly detailed. Following an Introduction, Chapter  offers a well-researched account of the poems Burns composed on American topics, contextualizing them in relation not only to contemporary events across the Atlantic, but also to British parliamentary politics and Burns’s own social networks. e succeeding chapter traces in depth the patterns of trade and circulation that facilitated the early dissemination of Burns’s work in the United States. Particularly notable here is Sood’s consideration of the ways in which the...

Music and Narrative in the Eighteenth Century: Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide as Dramatic Tableau

This article puts forward a new theory for discussing eighteenth-century music as narrative by combining literary theories of narrative with an analytical and historical exploration of the eighteenth-century opera overture. Through a consideration of how the overture to Iphigenie en Aulide prepares spectators for the ensuing drama and through a reconsideration of the role of (often ignored) devices such as musical repetition, this article shows how theories of theatre, drama, and narrative can inform our understanding of how music can be thought of in narrative terms and how eighteenth-century music was able to express a dramatic argument akin to that of a literary narrative. A hermeneutic approach is taken throughout that combines a (structuralist) analysis of the overture with a (poststructuralist) investigation into the overture’s reception history and of eighteenth-century literary and dramatic theory. By proposing that music has a narrative potential, rather than an explicit structural narrative, the article seeks to provide a theoretical bedrock for future studies that place the ‘reader’ or listener as participant.

Aesthetic Judgments and Their Cultural Grounding

Abstract At present, the theoretical approaches of Baumgarten and Kant continue to constitute the framework for discussing the nature of aesthetic judgments about art, including the question of what such judgments are really articulating. In distinction to those two eighteenth-century theorists, today we would largely avoid an assumption that aesthetic judgments necessarily attribute beauty to the objects being judged; we would as a rule take a far more complex approach to the topic. But whatever we say about art, even today many theorists wish to ground aesthetic judgments in particularities of the aesthetic object, like Baumgarten, or in specific moments of the aesthetic experience, like Kant.