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9781611462883

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[T]he book is briskly and authoritatively written. From paragraph to paragraph, there is a satisfying sense of things getting done-succinct summaries and secure signposting of the argument. Pleasingly aware of the text in the room. . . readers gain rewards from this book well beyond what they might expect from its carefully circumscribed topic. * Eighteenth-Century Studies * All of time, all of creation, all compacted in a quarter of a century: that is what John William Knapp gives us in Fiddled out of Reason: Addison and the Rise of Hymnic Verse, 1687-1712. Freeing hymns from their stereotyped attachment to specific creeds or even from religion generally, Knapp delivers a rigorous guide to the surprisingly complex genre of short but enthusiastic lyrical praise. . . . Knapp's masterful analysis of odes, songs, panegyrics, ovations, and operas overleaps disciplinary boundaries while helping us to understand how so many effusive verses fit together in a shared tradition. -- Kevin Cope, Louisiana State University John William Knapp's study of Addison and hymnic verse is lucid, learned, and important. It reminds us of the great value of a wrongly neglected author's achievements in a wrongly neglected genre. -- Howard D. Weinbrot, University of Wisconsin, Madison [Fiddled Out of Reason] is a substantial and well-documented study that introduces Addison's poetic oeuvre in the context of non-devotional church music and hymns of the period 1687 to 1812. The discussions here are keyed into an investigation into how authors seek an alternative to the well-documented moral and artistic risks of Italian opera and its English followers. -- Rosalind Powell, University of Bristol Fiddled Out of Reason provides a close study of Joseph Addison's sequence of five hymns, first published in the Spectator in 1712, as a way of recasting what it means to study the English hymn at the turn of the eighteenth century. -- Christopher N. Phillips, Lafayette College

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John Knapp is visiting scholar in the English Department at the University of New Mexico and instructor of English and humanities at Albuquerque Academy.

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