Samuel Johnson famously referred to his future biographer, the unsociable magistrate Sir John Hawkins, as “a most unclubbable man." Conversely, this celebratory volume gathers distinguished eighteenth-century studies scholars to honor the achievements, professional generosity, and sociability of Greg Clingham, taking as its theme textual and social group formations. Here, Philip Smallwood examines the “mirrored minds” of Johnson and Shakespeare, while David Hopkins parses intersections of the general and particular in three key eighteenth-century figures. Aaron Hanlon draws parallels between instances of physical rambling and rhetorical strategies in Johnson’s Rambler, while Cedric D. Reverand dissects the intertextual strands uniting Dryden and Pope. Contributors take up other topics significant to the field, including post-feminism, travel, and seismology. Whether discussing cultural exchange or textual reciprocities, each piece extends the theme, building on the trope of relationship to organize and express its findings. Rounding out this collection are tributes from Clingham’s former students and colleagues, including original poetry.
 

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.

The essays in Virgin Microbe foreground thematic issues and advance recent theoretical agendas, such as the study of identity construction and the relationship between the avant-garde and mass culture, rather than focusing on biographies of individual Dadaists or centers of Dada activity. The authors represent a wider spectrum of disciplines and a broader international perspective than other recent collections on Dada. Ambitious in terms of contemporary academic interests, Virgin Microbe draws on a rich spectrum of intellectual traditions and contexts, prioritizing Dada’s metaphysical enquiries and its complicated connection to modernity.