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Twentieth century critics have definite ideas about tragedy. They
maintain that in a true tragedy, fate must feel the resistance of
the tragic hero's moral freedom before finally crushing him, thus
generating our ambivalent sense of terrible waste coupled with
spiritual consolation. Yet far from being a timeless truth, this
account of tragedy only emerged in the wake of the French
Revolution. What Was Tragedy? demonstrates that this account of the
tragic, which has been hegemonic from the early nineteenth century
to the present despite all the twists and turns of critical fashion
in the twentieth century, obscured an earlier poetics of tragedy
that evolved from 1515 to 1795. By reconstructing that poetics,
Blair Hoxby makes sense of plays that are "merely pathetic, not
truly tragic," of operas with happy endings, of Christian
tragedies, and of other plays that advertised themselves as
tragedies to early modern audiences and yet have subsequently been
denied the palm of tragedy by critics. In doing so, Hoxby not only
illuminates masterpieces by Shakespeare, Calderon, Corneille,
Racine, Milton, and Mozart, he also revivifies a vast repertoire of
tragic drama and opera that has been relegated to obscurity by
critical developments since 1800. He suggests how many of these
plays might be reclaimed as living works of theater. And by
reconstructing a lost conception of tragedy both ancient and
modern, he illuminates the hidden assumptions and peculiar
blind-spots of the idealist critical tradition that runs from
Schelling, Schlegel, and Hegel, through Wagner, Nietzsche, and
Freud, up to modern post-structuralism.
The commercial revolution of the seventeenth century deeply changed
English culture. In this ambitious book, Blair Hoxby explores what
that economic transformation meant to the century's greatest poet,
John Milton, and to the broader literary tradition in which he
worked. Hoxby places Milton's work-as well as the writings of
contemporary reformers like the Levellers, poets like John Dryden,
and political economists like Sir William Petty-within the
framework of England's economic history between 1601 and 1724.
Literary history swerved in this period, Hoxby demonstrates, as a
burgeoning economic discourse pressed authors to reimagine ideas
about self, community, and empire. Hoxby shows that, contrary to
commonly held views, Milton was a sophisticated economic thinker.
Close readings of Milton's prose and verse reveal the importance of
economic ideas in a wide range of his most famous writings, from
Areopagitica to Samson Agonistes to Paradise Lost.
Since the nineteenth century, some of the most influential
historians have portrayed opera and tragedy as wholly distinct
cultural phenomena. These historians have denied a meaningful
connection between the tragedy of the ancients and the efforts of
early modern composers to arrive at styles that were intensely
dramatic. Drawing on a series of case studies, Opera, Tragedy, and
Neighbouring Forms from Corneille to Calzabigi traces the
productive, if at times rivalrous, relationship between opera and
tragedy from the institution of French regular tragedy under
Richelieu in the 1630s to the reform of opera championed by
Calzabigi and Gluck in the late eighteenth century. Blair Hoxby and
his fellow contributors shed light on "neighbouring forms" of
theatre, including pastoral drama, tragédie en machines, tragédie
en musique, and Goldoni’s dramma giocoso. Their analysis includes
famous masterpieces by Corneille, Voltaire, Metastasio, Goldoni,
Calzabigi, Handel, and Gluck, as well as lesser-known artists such
as Luisa Bergalli, the first female librettist to write for the
public theatre in Italy. Opera, Tragedy, and Neighbouring Forms
from Corneille to Calzabigi delves into a series of quarrels and
debates in order to illuminate the history of seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century theatre.
Twentieth century critics have definite ideas about tragedy. They
maintain that in a true tragedy, fate must feel the resistance of
the tragic hero's moral freedom before finally crushing him, thus
generating our ambivalent sense of terrible waste coupled with
spiritual consolation. Yet far from being a timeless truth, this
account of tragedy only emerged in the wake of the French
Revolution. What Was Tragedy? demonstrates that this account of the
tragic, which has been hegemonic from the early nineteenth century
to the present despite all the twists and turns of critical fashion
in the twentieth century, obscured an earlier poetics of tragedy
that evolved from 1515 to 1795. By reconstructing that poetics,
Blair Hoxby makes sense of plays that are "merely pathetic, not
truly tragic," of operas with happy endings, of Christian
tragedies, and of other plays that advertised themselves as
tragedies to early modern audiences and yet have subsequently been
denied the palm of tragedy by critics. In doing so, Hoxby not only
illuminates masterpieces by Shakespeare, Calderon, Corneille,
Racine, Milton, and Mozart, he also revivifies a vast repertoire of
tragic drama and opera that has been relegated to obscurity by
critical developments since 1800. He suggests how many of these
plays might be reclaimed as living works of theater. And by
reconstructing a lost conception of tragedy both ancient and
modern, he illuminates the hidden assumptions and peculiar
blind-spots of the idealist critical tradition that runs from
Schelling, Schlegel, and Hegel, through Wagner, Nietzsche, and
Freud, up to modern post-structuralism.
Milton criticism often treats the poet as if he were the last of
the Renaissance poets or a visionary prophet who remained
misunderstood until he was read by the Romantics. At the same time,
literary histories of the period often invoke a Long Eighteenth
Century that reaches its climax with the French Revolution or the
Reform Bill of 1832. What gets overlooked in such accounts is the
rich story of Milton's relationship to his contemporaries and early
eighteenth-century heirs. The essays in this collection demonstrate
that some of Milton's earliest readers were more perceptive than
Romantic and twentieth-century interpreters. The translations,
editions, and commentaries produced by early eighteenth century men
of letters emerge as the seedbed of modern criticism and the term
'neoclassical' is itself unmasked as an inadequate characterization
of the literary criticism and poetry of the period-a period that
could brilliantly define a Miltonic sublime, even as it supported
and described all the varieties of parody and domestication found
in the mock epic and the novel. These essays, which are written by
a team of leading Miltonists and scholars of the Restoration and
eighteenth century, cover a range of topics-from Milton's early
editors and translators to his first theatrical producers; from
Miltonic similes in Pope's Iliad to Miltonic echoes in Austen's
Pride and Prejudice; from marriage, to slavery, to republicanism,
to the heresy of Arianism. What they share in common is a
conviction that the early eighteenth century understood Milton and
that the Long Restoration cannot be understood without him.
Milton criticism often treats the poet as if he were the last of
the Renaissance poets or a visionary prophet who remained
misunderstood until he was read by the Romantics. At the same time,
literary histories of the period often invoke a Long Eighteenth
Century that reaches its climax with the French Revolution or the
Reform Bill of 1832. What gets overlooked in such accounts is the
rich story of Milton's relationship to his contemporaries and early
eighteenth-century heirs. The essays in this collection demonstrate
that some of Milton's earliest readers were more perceptive than
Romantic and twentieth-century interpreters. The translations,
editions, and commentaries produced by early eighteenth century men
of letters emerge as the seedbed of modern criticism and the term
'neoclassical' is itself unmasked as an inadequate characterization
of the literary criticism and poetry of the period-a period that
could brilliantly define a Miltonic sublime, even as it supported
and described all the varieties of parody and domestication found
in the mock epic and the novel. These essays, which are written by
a team of leading Miltonists and scholars of the Restoration and
eighteenth century, cover a range of topics-from Milton's early
editors and translators to his first theatrical producers; from
Miltonic similes in Pope's Iliad to Miltonic echoes in Austen's
Pride and Prejudice; from marriage, to slavery, to republicanism,
to the heresy of Arianism. What they share in common is a
conviction that the early eighteenth century understood Milton and
that the Long Restoration cannot be understood without him.
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