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2004-2005 Fellows

2004-2005 Fellow Hoxby

Blair Hoxby

Yale University
Department of English

Blair Hoxby, Associate Professor of English at Yale University, is the author of Mammon's Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton. While at the Humanities Center, he will be writing a book entitled "Baroque Tragedy: Passion and Performance in the Long Seventeenth Century." Hoxby holds an A.B. from Harvard University, an M.Phil.from the University of Oxford, and a Ph.D. from Yale University.

Project Summary

Hoxby's book, "Baroque Tragedy: Passion and Performance in the Long Seventeenth Century," analyzes a baroque style of dramaturgy that made use of elongated theaters, moveable sets, and a musical style of recitation that was intended to move the passions of audiences as Greek tragedy was said to have done. It argues that the management of the passions, and not a model of tragic action, lies at the heart of the period's conception of tragedy, that we must return sacred tragedy to its rightful place in histories of the genre, and that we should take seriously the teleological view that tragic opera represented not a decadent development but a return to ancient dramaturgy.