Originally published in 2000, this book highlights the interst Sedaine's life and work is now, belatedly, provoking in many scholarly disciplines. If Sedaine speaks today to literary history, theatre history and opera studies, it is because he possessed a multivalent vision, one which accounts for both his past neglect and is present rediscovery. Like many others, he believed that the established, 'official' genres needed to be reformed; unlike many, he made it his business to transform the actual language and operation of the theatre arts he practised. Until late eighteenth-century opera and drama in France become better understood, Sedaine's immense importance for the development of Romantic opera and theatre risks remaining generally concealed; to reveal something of this importance is one main reason for publishing the present volume. This book includes chapters on Sedaine and the question of genre, the representation of the female in the dramas of Sedaine, and the words, gestures and other signs in the era of Sedaine.

This volume's essays focus on the relationships between texts and readers, images and viewers, performance and audience during the Enlightenment in France, England, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, and North America. The essays range from exploring the effects of rococo space on religious experience to analyzing the transmission of texts across national and temporal boundaries.

Contributors and Contents:

Michael Yonan, The Wieskirche: Movement, Perception, and Salvation in the Bavarian Rococo

Sandro Jung, Thomas Stothard, Illustration, and the Royal Engagement Pocket Atlas, 1779-1826

Hector Reyes, Drawing and History in the Comte de Caylus' Recueil d'antiquites

Marc H. Lerner, William Tell's Atlantic Travels in the Revolutionary Era

Katrin Berndt, Civic Virtues in the Restless Polity: Sir Walter Scott's Fergusonian Vision of British Civil Society in Redgauntlet (1824) Danielle Spratt, Gulliver's Economized Body: Colonial Projects and the Human/Animal Divide in the Travels Julie Henigan, Print and Oral Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Irish Ballad

David A. Brewer, Print, Performance, Personhood, Polly Honeycombe

Zeina Hakim, Whose Story? The Game of Fiction in Early Eighteenth-Century French Literature

Dorothee Birke, Between Direction and Diversion: Chapter Titles in English Novels of the Mid-Eighteenth Century

Catherine Keohane, Ann Yearsley's Clifton Hill and Its Lessons in Reading

Jennifer Germann, Tracing Marie-Eleonore Godefroid: Women's Artistic Networks in Early Nineteenth-Century Paris

The artistic accomplishments of James Northcote (1746-1831) have tended to be overshadowed by his role as a biographer of Joshua Reynolds, first president of the Royal Academy of Arts, with whom Northcote apprenticed for five years. Here, Mark Ledbury constructs a very different image of Northcote: that of a prolific member of the Royal Academy and an active participant in the cultural and political circles of the Romantic era, as well as a portrait and history painter in his own right. This book pays particular attention to Northcote's One Hundred Fables (1828), a masterpiece of wood engraving, and the unconventional, collaged manuscripts for the volume, now at the Yale Center for British Art. Along with another series of collages now at The Morgan Library & Museum and a second volume of fables published posthumously in 1833, these collages and printed works constitute the most ambitious project of the artist's later years. An underappreciated and courageously eccentric masterpiece, the Fables were an early experiment in what is now a familiar multimedia practice and are extensively published here for the first time. Idiosyncratic, personal, and visionary, the Fables serve as a lens through which to examine Northcote's long, complex, and fruitful artistic career. Distributed for the Yale Center for British Art Exhibition Schedule: Yale Center for British Art (10/02/14-12/14/14)

The essays in this volume show that Versailles was not the static creation of one man, but a hugely complex cultural space; a centre of power, but also of life, love, anxiety, creation, and an enduring palimpsest of aspirations, desires, and ruptures. The splendour of the Château and the masterpieces of art and design that it contains mask a more complex and sometimes more sordid history of human struggle and achievement. The case studies presented by the contributors to this book cannot provide a comprehensive account of the Palace of Versailles and its domains, the life within its walls, its visitors, and the art and architecture that it has inspired from the seventeenth century to the present day: from the palace of the Sun King to the Penthouse of Donald Trump. However, this innovative collection will reshape—or even radically redefine—our understanding of the palace of Versailles and its posterity.

The essays in this volume show that Versailles was not the static creation of one man, but a hugely complex cultural space; a centre of power, but also of life, love, anxiety, creation, and an enduring palimpsest of aspirations, desires, and ruptures. The splendour of the Château and the masterpieces of art and design that it contains mask a more complex and sometimes more sordid history of human struggle and achievement. The case studies presented by the contributors to this book cannot provide a comprehensive account of the Palace of Versailles and its domains, the life within its walls, its visitors, and the art and architecture that it has inspired from the seventeenth century to the present day: from the palace of the Sun King to the Penthouse of Donald Trump. However, this innovative collection will reshape—or even radically redefine—our understanding of the palace of Versailles and its posterity.

Fictions of Art History, the most recent addition to the Clark Studies in the Visual Arts series, addresses art history's complex relationships with fiction, poetry, and creative writing. Inspired by a 2010 conference, the volume examines art historians' viewing practices and modes of writing. How, the contributors ask, are we to unravel the supposed facts of history from the fictions constructed in works of art? How do art historians employ or resist devices of fiction, and what are the effects of those choices on the reader? In styles by turns witty, elliptical, and plain-speaking, the essays in Fictions of Art History are fascinating and provocative critical interventions in art history. Distributed for the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute

With essays by Valerie Bajou, Philippe Bordes, Thomas Crow, Michael Fried, Tom Gretton, Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Stephane Guegan, Daniel Harkett, Godehard Janzing, Dorothy Johnson, Mehdi Korchane, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Issa Lampe, Mark Ledbury, Simon Lee, Heather McPherson, David O'Brien, Satish Padiyar, Todd Porterfield, Susan L. Siegfried, and Helen Weston Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), the most celebrated painter of his era, was appointed court painter to Napoleon in 1804 and exiled to Brussels in 1816. This important book--based on the proceedings of an international symposium--explores David's grand projects of the Empire period and the often mysterious works produced in his last years as a political exile. David after David features twenty-one essays by leading art historians that discuss these later works--which include innovative portraits as well as paintings and drawings that address the opposing themes of the antique and modern--in the aesthetic, political, and social contexts of their production and reception. The book also draws upon recently discovered letters the artist wrote in exile and provides fascinating new perspectives into his life and art. Distributed for the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts