Criticism, Performance, and the Passions in the Eighteenth Century
The Art of Transition

Recovers eighteenth-century appreciation of transition as a critical tool for analysing the expression and reception of emotion in theatre.

James Harriman-Smith (Author)

9781108835497, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 18 March 2021

252 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 1.7 cm, 0.5 kg

'The Art of Transition is a welcome and even thrilling book because it offers its reader a new word for thinking about - and through that word, a new way of reading - the eighteenth-century archive.' David Francis Taylor, The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats

Great art is about emotion. In the eighteenth century, and especially for the English stage, critics developed a sensitivity to both the passions of a performance and what they called the transitions between those passions. It was these pivotal transitions, scripted by authors and executed by actors, that could make King Lear beautiful, Hamlet terrifying, Archer hilarious and Zara electrifying. James Harriman-Smith recovers a lost way of appreciating theatre as a set of transitions that produce simultaneously iconic and dynamic spectacles; fascinating moments when anything seems possible. Offering fresh readings and interpretations of Shakespearean and eighteenth-century tragedy, historical acting theory and early character criticism, this volume demonstrates how a concern with transition binds drama to everything, from lyric poetry and Newtonian science, to fine art and sceptical enquiry into the nature of the self.

1. Dramatic Transition
2. Zara
3. Odes
4. King Lear
5. Dramatic Character.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Theatre studies [AN]