Performing the "everyday"

Book excerpt: This interdisciplinary anthology explores the representation of everyday life across several disciplines in a century known for its interest in individual experience of the mundane as well as the heroic. Comprised of essays by established and emerging scholars of literature, art, and music history, the volume explores not merely the range of performances under the banner of the everyday, but also the meanings inherent in these attempts to create art out of the experience of the real. In this collection, the authors attempt to provide a wide-ranging picture of the many ways in which the notion of the everyday is a valuable conceptual frame through which the eighteenth century may be apprehended, as this critical term allows for issues of gender, race, and class to come into focus. Alden Cavanaugh is Associate Professor of Art History at Indiana State University.