EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LIFE最新文献

{"title":"Fielding, Opera, and Oratorio: The Case of Handel","authors":"Charles Trainor","doi":"10.1215/00982601-9955338","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00982601-9955338","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:It is generally stated without qualification that Fielding was a great admirer of Handel. This is understandable given that his works of the 1740s and 1750s are replete with praise of the composer. Curiously, however, during the 1730s, his compliments to Handel are few and far between. True, in his ballad operas from that period, he borrowed a number of the composer's melodies, but in multiple instances, he attached comic lyrics that mocked their seriousness. This paper contends that Fielding's apparent change in attitude in the 1740s was rooted in Handel's own change as he moved away from Italian opera and toward English oratorio. While Fielding was critical of the former, the latter genre aligned with his aesthetic ideal, which favored word-centric music performed in English with a minimum of \"Tinsel, or … Ostentation.\" Indeed, it is arguable that in his ballad-opera adaptations of Handel, which he often assigned to performers whom Handel also employed, Fielding was prefiguring on a lesser scale what would later make Handel his ideal of all an English composer should be.","PeriodicalId":43296,"journal":{"name":"EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LIFE","volume":"1 1","pages":"100 - 83"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79497801","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"Frances Burney's Legacy Duty Account\" (1840)","authors":"John A Jones, P. Sabor","doi":"10.1215/00982601-9955285","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00982601-9955285","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43296,"journal":{"name":"EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LIFE","volume":"35 1","pages":"1 - 9"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78482355","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Morphology of Handel's Operas","authors":"R. Hume","doi":"10.1215/00982601-9955324","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00982601-9955324","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Little scholarly attention has been devoted to the dramaturgy of Handel's operas, which seems secondary to musical and circumstantial matters of venue and performers. This article argues that important things can be learned by attempting to categorize, analyze, and assess the librettos in strictly dramaturgical terms. We need to ask whether there is coherence or development, and what Handel wanted in the librettos he set. Handel's operas have generally been categorized by date and/or venue. Winton Dean categorized them by \"dominant temper,\" characterized as \"heroic or dynastic,\" \"magic operas,\" and \"antiheroic.\" By implication, Handel approached each opera on a case-by-case basis, not much concerned with generic form. Ellen T. Harris critiqued Dean and offered a dialectical model, dividing the operas into \"pastoral\" and \"heroic\" groups. But if we ask \"What is the 'source of action' within each plot?,\" we find four largely distinct groups: (1) villain or villainess; (2) intrigue complexities; (3) situational donné; and (4) character display. After nearly fifteen years of plot structures driven by villains, Handel began to experiment with quite different plot designs (though he did not change librettists). Handel's operas comprise, structurally, a series of mostly static scenes in which intense feelings (ambition, lust, hope, fear, doubt, pain, remorse, etc.) are expressed. The happy-ending convention in opera seria renders plot resolution secondary. Handel's operas are essentially situational rather than plot driven. They use dramatic situations over and over (e.g., supplication, deliverance, abduction, remorse, enmity of kinsmen, self-sacrifice). Handel is far more concerned with intense expression of emotion than with telling a story. In all four types of Handelian opera, quasi-ideal heroes or heroines are featured. In (1) they are threatened by the machinations of a villain; in (2) they find themselves entangled in intrigue; in (3) they are caught in the toils of fate or circumstances; and in (4) the aim is mostly just display of heroic character. Handel's bent was for situation and emotion rather than narrative and resolution. Great and stageable as the best of Handel's operas are, the English oratorio offered him a genre ultimately more congenial to his talents and inclinations.","PeriodicalId":43296,"journal":{"name":"EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LIFE","volume":"476 1","pages":"52 - 82"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76362804","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"Law Enough to Set You Free\": Contract, Community, and Consent in the Comedies of George Farquhar","authors":"A. Feldman","doi":"10.1215/00982601-9664397","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00982601-9664397","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:From his first play, Love and a Bottle (1698), to the masterpiece that crowned his career, The Beaux' Stratagem (1707), George Farquhar's oeuvre is traversed by legal motifs and legal scenarios, from satirical attacks upon the judiciary, to serious engagements with the law of contract, in contexts as varied as military impressment and spousal neglect. The period that followed the accession of William and Mary, in 1688, and the Bill of Rights to which they assented in 1689, is commonly regarded as being governed by contractual relationships between rational individuals, entering into reciprocal obligations, pursuing their interests, while recognizing their natural rights. But Farquhar's comedies exhibit a conspicuous distrust of the legal profession, and of contract as a means of ensuring ethical solutions either to domestic or political conflicts. Farquhar's engagements with the law, in general, and the law of contracts, in particular, reorient drama away from the rights of the liberal subject, autonomously imagined, toward renewed conceptions of the social good, and the ethics of the community, replacing regulatory frameworks with emancipatory dispensations, in the benevolent comic spirit that characterizes his works.","PeriodicalId":43296,"journal":{"name":"EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LIFE","volume":"85 1","pages":"30 - 60"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73992985","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"My Case,\" Her Cure: William Hay's Permissible Gender Fluidity and Mrs. Stephens's Controversy","authors":"Lesley Thulin","doi":"10.1215/00982601-9664384","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00982601-9664384","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In Deformity: An Essay (1754), William Hay offers an autobiographical account of his life as a hunchbacked member of the House of Commons, followed by an appendix, titled \"My Case,\" which details an experimental health regimen he adopted to treat the more quotidian ailment of chronic bladder stones. In an apparent disjunction with the preceding philosophical essay, \"My Case\" brings deformity into a medicalized, rather than humanized, register, crediting Joanna Stephens's controversial domestic remedy—and Hay's subsequent adjustment of it—with allowing him to write the text. This article compares the reception history of Stephens's recipe and Deformity: An Essay, examining why Stephens attracted censure whereas Hay garnered approval for endorsing the same basic treatment. Focusing on both Stephens's and Hay's gender-fluid personae, I argue that Hay, unlike Stephens, was able to demonstrate an unusually nimble approach to the eighteenth century's emergent categories of gender, because his deformity, gender, and class helped, rather than hindered, such persona making.","PeriodicalId":43296,"journal":{"name":"EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LIFE","volume":"79 1","pages":"1 - 29"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86816261","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"William Hogarth and Richard Steele","authors":"Ronald Paulson, A. Marshall","doi":"10.1215/00982601-9664410","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00982601-9664410","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:William Hogarth and Richard Steele were in many ways part of the same intellectual and religiopolitical milieu, one that also links them both to the radical Whig cleric Benjamin Hoadly. Modern scholars have almost always connected Steele to Joseph Addison, emphasizing Steele's morals-and-manners journalism—but this is not a fair representation of his output. Identifying the connections between Steele and Hogarth allows us to appreciate each man's more radical proclivities. Hogarth transforms Steele's populism into something still more radical, emphasizing religion, and to do so he exploits the greater flexibility, ambiguity, and complexity of the graphic mode. An examination of Steele and Hoadly, among other things, permits us to situate more precisely the \"sacred parody\" of Hogarth's major works on a grid of such terms as Radical Dissenter, Hoadlian Low Church-man, Deist, Enlightenment gentleman, and witty blasphemer.","PeriodicalId":43296,"journal":{"name":"EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LIFE","volume":"45 1","pages":"61 - 87"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76615232","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Somebody's Complaint: Isabella Kelly, Warren Hastings, and the Strange Case of Ruthinglenne","authors":"Yael Shapira","doi":"10.1215/00982601-9664436","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00982601-9664436","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In 1795, novelist Isabella Kelly (ca. 1759–1857) sent a plea for financial help to Warren Hastings (1732–1818), the first British governor-general of India, who had known her late father-in-law. Six years later, her Minerva Press novel Ruthinglenne, or, the Critical Moment (1801) included a scene in which a widowed woman novelist asks for the help of a senior East India official and is rudely rebuffed. Was Kelly writing about her real-life exchange with Hastings, and if so, what might she have been hoping to achieve? The essay attempts to answer these questions in a speculative argument that examines Ruthinglenne's straddling of fact and fiction; by analyzing both the novel and its paratexts, I propose that Kelly's fictional encoding of fact would have been obvious to at least some of her readers. The case of Ruthinglenne, I further argue, lends support to recent critical claims regarding the overlooked richness of Minerva novels, and demonstrates the need to round out our historical understanding of neglected women writers through combined textual and biographical research.","PeriodicalId":43296,"journal":{"name":"EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LIFE","volume":"65 1","pages":"113 - 142"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83456500","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Lovelace's \"Gloomy Scheme of Death\": Suffering, Dueling, and Suicide in Richardson's Clarissa","authors":"Rachel Sulich","doi":"10.1215/00982601-9664423","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00982601-9664423","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article uses Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (1747–48) as a case study in order to expose the relationship between dueling and suicide in eighteenth-century literature and culture. By examining the novel alongside contemporary documents concerning dueling, I make the case that Lovelace's fatal duel with Morden is a covert form of self-destruction, one that allows him to disguise and ultimately escape his sufferings while maintaining his masculine honor and reputation. While many critics have focused on Clarissa's suicide in Richardson's novel, few have considered the nature of Lovelace's own self-willed death at length. The following consideration of Lovelace's \"gloomy scheme of death\" reveals the violence necessary for performances of masculinity in the early to mid-eighteenth century and suggests that the duel is at the heart at such efforts at self-display.","PeriodicalId":43296,"journal":{"name":"EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LIFE","volume":"559 1","pages":"112 - 88"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77157082","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Publishing Perils and Friendships","authors":"Gene Hammond","doi":"10.1215/00982601-9467243","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00982601-9467243","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43296,"journal":{"name":"EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LIFE","volume":"101 1","pages":"115 - 120"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85585639","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"What Cato Did: Suicide, Sentimentalism, and the Drama of Emulation","authors":"D. Taylor","doi":"10.1215/00982601-9467204","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00982601-9467204","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Much recent criticism of Joseph Addison’s Cato (1713) regards the tragedy as determinedly resistant to its eponymous protagonist’s stoic heroism. Cato, it is argued, critiques Cato. But this wasn’t how Addison’s immediate contemporaries experienced the play. For many commentators, Addison’s Cato was a model not only to be applauded but also imitated. In this essay, I take seriously this disconnection between current interpretation and immediate reception. I first attend to the tragedy’s fifth act, where we see a concerted attempt both to flag the protagonist’s fallibility and also to place a critical frame around the problematic spectacle of stoic suicide. In the second part of the essay, I then consider how it was that an instrumentalist view of the play nonetheless became canon. Here, I trace Richard Steele’s appropriation of Cato to his project to reform the stage, a project that staked its claims for the cultural and moral efficacy of the theater on an avowedly emulative (and sentimental) model of drama. And I argue that Addison’s belated insistence on his protagonist’s all-too-humanness works to sentimentalize the character and so paradoxically opens up the very possibility of imitation that it seemingly seeks to foreclose.","PeriodicalId":43296,"journal":{"name":"EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LIFE","volume":"6 1","pages":"56 - 78"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91259266","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}