The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Opera by
Reflecting a wide variety of approaches to eighteenth-century opera, this Companion brings together leading international experts in the field to provide a valuable reference source. Viewing opera as a complex and fascinating form of art and social ritual, rather than reducing it simply to music and text analysis, individual essays investigate aspects such as audiences, architecture of the theaters, marketing, acting style, and the politics and strategy of representing class and gender. Overall, the volume provides a synthesis of well established knowledge, reflects recent research on eighteenth-century opera, and stimulates further research. The reader is encouraged to view opera as a cultural phenomenon that can reveal aspects of our culture, both past and present. Eighteenth-century opera is experiencing continuing critical and popular success through innovative and provoking productions world-wide, and this Companion will appeal to opera goers as well as to students and teachers of this key topic.
The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry by
This volume analyzes major premises, preoccupations, and practices of a wide range of English poets writing from 1700 to the 1790s, including Pope and Thomson, Anna Seward and Erasmus Darwin. Specially commissioned essays by leading scholars avoid familiar categories and single-author approaches to consider such large poetic themes as nature, the city, political passions, the relation of death to desire and dreams, the rise of a national tradition, appeals to an imagined future, and the meanings of "sensibility." The essays are supported by a chronology and guides to further reading.
The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel by
This multifaceted picture of the British novel in its formative decades provides an indispensable guide for students of the eighteenth-century novel, and its place within the culture of its time. Drawing on new research in social and political history, the twelve contributors to this Companion challenge and refine the traditional view of the novel's origins and purposes. Sentimental and Gothic fiction, and fiction by women, are discussed, alongside detailed readings of work by Defoe, Swift, Richardson, Henry Fielding, Sterne, Smollett and Burney.
The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Thought by
The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Thought gives a comprehensive overview of intellectual life in the eighteenth-century Anglophone world at a time when the boundaries of knowledge were growing rapidly in response to a world undergoing radical change. Organised in two parts, the volume begins with four wide-ranging chapters on key areas of thought: philosophy, science, political and legal theory, and religion. The second part comprises shorter chapters that focus on subjects of emerging inquiry, such as aesthetics, economics, and sensibility and emotion, as well as intellectual disciplines undergoing methodological evolution, such as history. A chronology is provided to help situate historical events, important thinkers, key publications, and intellectual milestones in relation to one another, and guides for further reading point the reader to avenues for deeper exploration of the Companion's various topics.
