James A. Winn

During the reign of Queen Anne (1702-1714), Wren finished St. Paul’s, Handel brought Italian opera to London, Pope published his astonishing early poems, Addison and Steele began their popular journals, Manley wrote scandalous fictions, Farquhar and Addison staged influential plays, Swift and Defoe flourished as political journalists, and Kneller and Jervas painted portraits. This broad study explores the period’s tendency to read all the arts politically. Baroque and Palladian styles in architecture, native and foreign styles in opera, natural and artificial methods in landscape gardening, even competing vocabularies for pastoral poetry took on partisan valences that can only be understood through interdisciplinary research.