A lecture by Misty Anderson will be held Friday, Feb. 7, from 3:15-4:15 p.m. in Guilford Parlor.
1772 was a signal year for rocks, which were featured in natural histories, public spectacles, and the elaborate set designs of Phillipe de Loutherbourg, the painter and set designer who revolutionized eighteenth-century set design. In Loutherbourg’s work, the ephemerality of the theatrical experience meets the symbolic freight of rock in a visual account of the prelapsarian past. His designs, full of wonder and enchantment, cultivate the audience’s desire for, even envy of, “primitive belief” as prior to the cognitive losses of modernity. His work resituated the experience of wonder for an age of skepticism.
Misty G. Anderson is Professor of English, a Lindsay Young Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences, and holds courtesy appointments as an Adjunct Professor in both the Theatre and Religious Studies departments at the University of Tennessee. Anderson is the author of Imagining Methodism in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Enthusiasm, Belief, and the Borders of the Self (Johns Hopkins, 2012) and Female Playwrights and Eighteenth-Century Comedy: Negotiating Marriage on the London Stage (Palgrave, 2002). She an editor of the new Routledge Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama (2017), which features a documentary she has produced about the CBT’s recent production of The Busy Body. She is currently at work on a second volume of the Routledge anthology and a third book project, God on Stage. She served as the editor of the journal Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700 from 2003-2016. She is currently an elected member of the executive board of ASECS (the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies), she chairs the Modern Language Association’s division on Religion and Literature, and serves on the editorial boards of Restoration and Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research. She is also a blogger for The Huffington Post.