Essays based on papers presented at four international conferences held at the UCLA Clark Library, 2005.

Between the waning of the Renaissance and the beginning of the Enlightenment, many fundamental aspects of human behaviour - from expressions of gender to the experience of time - underwent radical changes. While some of these transformations were recorded in words, others have survived in non-verbal cultural media, notably the visual arts, poetry, theatre, music, and dance. Structures of Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Cultural Expression explores how artists made use of these various cultural forms to grapple with human values in the increasingly heterodox world of the 1600s. Essays from prominent historians, musicologists, and art critics examine methods of non-verbal cultural expression through the broad themes of time, motion, the body, and global relations. Together, they show that seventeenth-century cultural expression was more than just an embryonic stage within Western artistic development. Instead, the contributors argue that this period marks some of the most profound changes in European subjectivities.

There is an unfortunate argument being made that feminist scholarship of eighteenth-century literary studies has fulfilled its potential in academic circles. The Future of Eighteenth-Century Feminist Scholarship: Beyond Recovery shows us otherwise. Each of the essays in this volume reaffirms the feminist principles that form the foundation of this area, then builds upon them by acknowledging the inevitable conflicts they or their subjects have faced and the contradictions they or their subjects have lived.

How have fairy tales from around the world changed over the centuries? What do they tell us about different cultures and societies? This volume traces the evolution of the genre over the period known as the long eighteenth century. It explores key developments including: the French fairy tale vogue of the 1690s, dominated by women authors including Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy and Marie-Jeanne Lhéritier, the fashion of the oriental tale in the early eighteenth century, launched by Antoine Galland's seminal translation of The Thousand and One Nights from Arabic into French, and the birth of European children's literature in the second half of the eighteenth century. Drawing together contributions from an international range of scholars in history, literature and cultural studies, this volume examines the intersections between diverse national tale traditions through different critical perspectives, producing an authoritative transnational history of the genre. An essential resource for researchers, scholars and students of literature, history and cultural studies, this book explores such themes and topics as: forms of the marvelous, adaptation, gender and sexuality, humans and non-humans, monsters and the monstrous, spaces, socialization, and power. A Cultural History of Fairy Tales (6-volume set) A Cultural History of Fairy Tales in Antiquity is also available as a part of a 6-volume set, A Cultural History of Fairy Tales, tracing fairy tales from antiquity to the present day, available in print, or within a fully-searchable digital library accessible through institutions by annual subscription or on perpetual access (see www.bloomsburyculturalhistory.com). Individual volumes for academics and researchers interested in specific historical periods are also available digitally via www.bloomsburycollections.com.

Early seventeenth-century Italy saw a revolution in instrumental music. Large, varied, and experimental, the new instrumental repertoire was crucial for the Western tradition—but until now, the impulses that gave rise to it had yet to be fully explored. Curious and Modern Inventions offers fresh insight into the motivating forces behind this music, tracing it to a new conception of instruments of all sorts—whether musical, artistic, or scientific—as vehicles of discovery. Rebecca Cypess shows that early modern thinkers were fascinated with instrumental technologies. The telescope, the clock, the pen, the lute—these were vital instruments for leading thinkers of the age, from Galileo Galilei to Giambattista Marino. No longer used merely to remake an object or repeat a process already known, instruments were increasingly seen as tools for open-ended inquiry that would lead to new knowledge. Engaging with themes from the history of science, literature, and the visual arts, this study reveals the intimate connections between instrumental music and the scientific and artisanal tools that served to mediate between individuals and the world around them.

The Cambridge Companion to Seventeenth-Century Opera is a much-needed introduction to one of the most defining areas of Western music history - the birth of opera and its developments during the first century of its existence. From opera's Italian foundations to its growth through Europe and the Americas, the volume charts the changing landscape – on stage and beyond – which shaped the way opera was produced and received. With a range from opera's sixteenth-century antecedents to the threshold of the eighteenth century, this path breaking book is broad enough to function as a comprehensive introduction, yet sufficiently detailed to offer valuable insights into most of early opera's many facets; it guides the reader towards authoritative written and musical sources appropriate for further study. It will be of interest to a wide audience, including undergraduate and graduate students in universities and equivalent institutions, and amateur and professional musicians.