Volume 25 of 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era investigates the local textures that make up the whole cloth of the Enlightenment. Ranging from China to Cheltenham and from Spinoza to civil insurrection, volume 25 celebrates the emergence of long-eighteenth-century culture from particularities and prodigies. Unfurling in the folds of this volume is a special feature on playwright, critic, and literary theorist John Dennis. Edited by Claude Willan, the feature returns a major player in eighteenth-century literary culture to his proper role at the center of eighteenth-century politics, art, publishing, and dramaturgy. This celebration of John Dennis mingles with a full company of essays in the character of revealing case studies. Essays on a veritable world of topics—on Enlightenment philosophy in China; on riots as epitomes of Anglo-French relations; on domestic animals as observers; on gothic landscapes; and on prominent literati such as Jonathan Swift, Arthur Murphy, and Samuel Johnson—unveil eye-opening perspectives on a “long” century that prized diversity and that looked for transformative events anywhere, everywhere, all the time. Topping it all off is a full portfolio of reviews evaluating the best books on the literature, philosophy, and the arts of this abundant era.

Lothario’s Corpse unearths a performance history, on and off the stage, of Restoration libertine drama in Britain’s eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While standard theater histories emphasize libertine drama’s gradual disappearance from the nation’s acting repertory following the dispersal of Stuart rule in 1688, Daniel Gustafson traces its persistent appeal for writers and performers wrestling with the powers of the emergent liberal subject and the tensions of that subject with sovereign absolutism. With its radical, absolutist characters and its scenarios of aristocratic license, Restoration libertine drama became a critical force with which to engage in debates about the liberty-loving British subject’s relation to key forms of liberal power and about the troubling allure of lawless sovereign power that lingers at the heart of the liberal imagination. Weaving together readings of a set of literary texts, theater anecdotes, political writings, and performances, Gustafson illustrates how the corpse of the Restoration stage libertine is revived in the period’s debates about liberty, sovereign desire, and the subject’s relation to modern forms of social control. Ultimately, Lothario’s Corpse suggests the “long-running” nature of Restoration theatrical culture, its revived and revised performances vital to what makes post-1688 Britain modern.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.