Music, Fable, and Fantasy
Thomas D’Urfey’s Wonders in the Sun and the Eighteenth-Century Political Animal
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21665879 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Heather Ladd (0000-0003-4427-7178, University of Lethbridge, corresponding author), Heather Ann Ladd (University of Lethbridge) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 39 |
| Pages | 133-157 |
| Publication date | 2020-05-14 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Lumen Selected Proceedings from the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1209-3696 • E-ISSN: 1927-8284 |
| Publisher | Consortium Erudit (PUBLISHER • CA) |
| DOI | 10.7202/1069407ar |
| OpenAlex | W3036087577 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 1 |
This article considers a strange, understudied work of eighteenth-century musical theatre, Thomas D’Urfey’s Wonders in the Sun (1706) . This highly intertextual, generically heterogeneous comic opera is a pastiche of literary and performative modes and ultimately a machine for generating wonder; it draws on elements from Aristophanes’ The Birds , seventeenth-century masque and semi-opera, as well as the lunar fictions. The article situates this play not only within a history of literary wonder and stage spectacle, but within the English tradition of politicized animal fable. Discussing D’Urfey’s comic opera against selections from John Gay’s Fables , it argues that the utopian/dystopian animal in these imaginative satires reveals the period’s twinned fascinations with discovery and alterity, as well as emergent discomfiture with anthro- and Eurocentric Enlightenment beliefs
Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Comics · Dystopia · Enlightenment · Fable · Fantasy · Literature · Opera · Performative utterance · Spectacle · Wonder · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · Philosophy · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism · Theater, Performance, and Music History
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |