front cover of English Theatrical Anecdotes, 1660-1800
English Theatrical Anecdotes, 1660-1800
Heather Ladd
University of Delaware Press, 2022
The essays in English Theatrical Anecdotes, 1660-1800 explore the theatrical anecdote’s role in the construction of stage fame in England’s emergent celebrity culture during the long eighteenth century, as well as the challenges of employing such anecdotes in theatre scholarship today. This collection showcases scholarship that complicates the theatrical anecdote and shows its many sides and applications beyond the expected comic punch. Discussing anecdotal narratives about theatre people as producing, maintaining, and sometimes toppling individual fame, this book crucially investigates a key mechanism of celebrity in the long eighteenth century that reaches into the nineteenth century and beyond. The anecdote erases boundaries between public and private and fictionalizing the individual in ways deeply familiar to twenty-first century celebrity culture.
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Studies in Criticism and Aesthetics, 1660-1800
Essays in Honor of Samuel Holt Monk
Howard Anderson and John S. Shea, Editors
University of Minnesota Press, 1967

Studies in Criticism and Aesthetics, 1660–1800 was first published in 1967. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

In this volume nineteen contributors, in as many essays, discuss various aspects of critical and aesthetic development in the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, from the time of Dryden to Wordsworth. This was a period in which traditional literary criticism progressed in important new directions and which saw the rise of aesthetic theory. The book is published in honor of Samuel Holt Monk, professor of English at the University of Minnesota, and distinguished American scholar in the field of eighteenth century English literature, literary criticism, and aesthetics.

The essays, all of which were written for this volume, analyze the literary theories and assumptions of some of the most important artists and critics of the time, as well as the aesthetic theories which influenced painting and literature. During the period under discussion, the progress of social and philosophical thought stimulated an intensive examination of the nature and function of art. Although neoclassical ideals dominated Restoration criticism and continued to influence Pope and later critics like Johnson and Reynolds, other tendencies were gaining ground, and throughout the eighteenth century the effort to reconcile a growing interest in "the pleasing emotions" with the tenets of classicism created criticism and aesthetic theory of extraordinary complexity. These essays illuminate that complexity without oversimplifying it.

The book is illustrated with reproductions of works of art of the period. In addition to the essays, there is a bibliography of Professor Monk's writings.

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