Literature and the Arts : Interdisciplinary Essays in Memory of James Anderson Winn

The 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. Contents Acknowledgments Introduction 1 Laughter from on High: The Arts of Contempt in Restoration England 2 Staging Davenant; or, Macbeth, the Musical 3 The Arts of Memory in Absalom and Achitophel: Dryden’s Response to Milton and Marvell 4 Peacocks and Rainbows: Visual Spectacle and Allegorical Performance in Albion and Albanius 5 “The Dyrham Decades”: The Cultural Connections of an English Country House, 1690–1720 6 Domenico Scarlatti: “Jesting with Art” 7 Queen Anne’s Other Women 8 Anne Donnellan: Friend of the Arts 9 Responding to Emma in 1816: Reviewers, Readers, and “Opinions” 10 Elizabeth Rivers and Christopher Smart: Eighteenth-Century Poetry across Time and Form Selected Bibliography Notes on Contributors Index