Toggle Main Menu Toggle Search

Open Access padlockePrints

The Newcastle University research output collection, currently available on ePrints, will shortly be moving to a new open repository platform, Figshare. To prepare for the data migration we have paused adding new content to ePrints, and will resume once the new repository is launched. During this time you will continue to have access to ePrints (but no new content will appear). We will share updates here when available.

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

Lookup NU author(s): Dr James Harriman-SmithORCiD

Downloads

Full text is not currently available for this publication.

Abstract

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.

Publication metadata

Author(s): Harriman-Smith J

Publication type: Authored Book

Publication status: Published

Year: 2021

Number of Pages: 236+xii

Print publication date: 18/03/2021

Acceptance date: 17/09/2019

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Place Published: Cambridge

URL: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108890847

Library holdings: Search Newcastle University Library for this item

ISBN: 9781108835497

Share