This book, which was originally published in 1976, is an interpretation of the thought of the major neo-classical dramatic critics in Italy, France and England during the period 1560-1770. Commentary is based in every case on a careful reading of original texts (by, for instance, Scaliger, Castelvetro, Corneille, D' Aubignac, Dryden, Johnson, Diderot, Mercier), which have been translated by the authors where necessary and are liberally quoted, and leads to the conclusion that neo-classicism found its natural fulfilment in nineteenth-century naturalism. Far from being academic, artificial, doctrinaire or rigid - pejorative terms usually applied to them - the neo-classical critics were asking fundamental questions about the nature of drama. The book attempts to 'place' a selection of early European dramatic criticism in a fresh context. It brings together a good deal of information not available elsewhere and presents it in a form which non-specialist readers will find easy to assimilate and which specialists will find stimulating as a sophisticated critical interpretation of neo-classicism.

This is the second volume in the series Sources of Dramatic Theory. This volume includes the major theoretical writing on drama and theatre from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, focusing on issues that are still relevant to our understanding of drama and theatre. Among the writers represented by their own essays or substantial extracts from longer works are: Voltaire, Diderot, Goldoni, Dr Johnson, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Hegel, and Coleridge.Many of the texts have been newly translated for this volume and all have been newly annotated and introduced.Recurrent topics and allusions are traced by a system of cross-references.

A Study Guide for "Neoclassicism," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Literary Movements for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Literary Movements for Students for all of your research needs.

Ten original essays on English drama from Tudor times onwards examines different aspects on the development of this art form.

This highly original and penetrating study explores fundamental intellectual predispositions and concepts which underpin the literature and thought of the Augustan period in England. By examining in particular Augustan notions of probability and the way they provided a framework for thinking about and organising experience, Dr Patey reconstructs a characteristically eighteenth-century theory of literature which offers a much more satisfactory account of the work of Pope, Johnson, Fielding and others than the Romantic literary categories already in existence. The scope of this study is encyclopaedic and it will be an essential reference work for all scholars of eighteenth-century English literature and intellectual history, as well as historians of ideas.

This book examines Shakespeare's influence and popularity in all aspects of eighteenth-century literature, culture and society.