The enormous popularity of The Beggar's Opera gave rise to a remarkable series of plays known as ballad opera, a form that dominated the eighteenth-century London stage during the 1730s, a crucial decade in the development of English theatre. Although virtually every major playwright of the period, including Colley Cibber,...
This dissertation investigates the ways in which poetry encourages visual images in the reader. This investigation breaks new ground, for in the wake of behaviorist psychology and the linguistic turn in literary theory, literary critics have ignored and often spurned the visual imagination. The project uses Imagist poetry as a...