Critical Essays from the Spectator by Joseph Addison: with four Essays by Richard Steele

1970 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Addison ◽  
Sir Richard Steele
Keyword(s):  
Joseph Addison ◽  
Richard Steele ◽  
The Spectator

scholarly journals 1. “Nas Raízes do Jornalismo Literário: Números Escolhidos de The Spectator (Londres, 1711-1714), Seleção, Tradução e Aparato Crítico”

2021 ◽  
pp. 11-36
Author(s):  
Jorge Bastos da Silva
Keyword(s):  
Joseph Addison ◽  
Richard Steele ◽  
The Spectator

Procede-se à apresentação de um conjunto seleccionado de artigos do periódico The Spectator (Londres, 1711-1714), da autoria de Joseph Addison e Richard Steele, em tradução portuguesa. A introdução frisa a im-portância destes artigos no desenvolvimento da forma do ensaio periodístico e caracteriza-os nalguns dos seus aspectos principais, como sejam a criação de personagens e o uso de máscaras, o objectivo de formar (o gosto, o carácter, a conduta) mais do que informar, o distanciamento estabelecido relativamente a compro-metimentos político-partidários, a presença de ensaios críticos sobre a literatura e outras artes, e a relação do periódico com a cultura literária do Classicismo.

2. Morality

2021 ◽  
pp. 29-52
Author(s):  
James A. Harris
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Moral Sense ◽  
Moral Progress ◽  
Essay Writing ◽  
Moral Thought ◽  
Common Life ◽  
Joseph Addison ◽  
Francis Hutcheson ◽  
Treatise Of Human Nature ◽  
The Spectator

‘Morality’ considers Hume’s moral thought as developed in Book Three of A Treatise of Human Nature, various of his essays, and, especially, An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals. Hume engages with the moral sense theory of Francis Hutcheson in the Treatise. He then turned to essay writing, in relation especially to the essays of Joseph Addison in The Spectator. This turn to essay writing sees Hume modify the purely ‘anatomical’ philosophy of the Treatise in favour of a more practical engagement with the morality of common life. In his work, Hume considered the damage done to natural moral sentiments by religion, and by Christianity in particular. Hume displayed a lack of confidence in moral progress, and showed a sense of the persistence and pervasiveness of human unhappiness. Hume also made an important contribution to aesthetics.

Sociability and Polite Improvement in Addison’s Periodicals

2021 ◽  
pp. 142-163
Author(s):  
Markman Ellish
Keyword(s):  
Social Reform ◽  
Public Culture ◽  
Women Readers ◽  
Tea Consumption ◽  
The Public ◽  
Richard Steele ◽  
Significant Extension ◽  
Periodical Essays ◽  
The Spectator

Addison argued in his periodical essays that the distinctive sociability of the coffee house was especially, if not uniquely, polite, rational, and civic, and as such, an important metaphor and location for Addison’s social reform. Addison developed his conception of coffee-house sociability in dialogue with Richard Steele, but while Steele argued that emulation of virtuous behaviour in neighbourly communities was sufficient guarantor of the polite and rational reformation of public culture, Addison repeatedly toyed with a more regulated model in which an arbiter or censor moderated coffee-house behaviour. In The Spectator, Addison had identified women readers as an important commercial and ideological opportunity. While women of the polite and middling classes bore the weight of Addison’s reformist expectations, such women were excluded from the public sociability of the coffee house. In recognition of this impasse, Addison and Steele addressed a series of essays to the tea table, a form of sociability in which women and female manners were dominant. These essays develop an innovative construction of tea-table sociability located in a fluid zone between public sociability and private domesticity, centred around tea consumption, polite conversation, and reading essays from The Spectator. The tea table was, accordingly, a significant extension and revision of their theory of public sociability.

On Bourgeois Dignity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Dunn Henderson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Socioeconomic Class ◽  
Joseph Addison ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
And Diffusion

Somewhere near the beginning of the eighteenth century a new concept of “dignity” was emerging alongside the rise of a new socioeconomic class, the bourgeoisie. This chapter explores the development of this distinctive new concept of dignity, investigating first the key elements of the so-called bourgeois virtues that provided content to this new ethos of dignity. Next, it probes the economic, political, and social conditions that facilitated the emergence and diffusion of bourgeois dignity during the eighteenth century. Finally, it discusses how this new understanding of dignity was diffused throughout society by one of the most influential literary endeavors of the period, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s The Spectator (1711–1714).

Joseph Addison

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Art History ◽  
Full Range ◽  
Samuel Johnson ◽  
Joseph Addison ◽  
Poetry Translation ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
Victorian Age ◽  
Historical Periods

Joseph Addison: Tercentenary Essays is a collection of fifteen essays by a team of internationally recognized experts specially commissioned to commemorate in 2019 the three-hundredth anniversary of Addison’s death. Almost exclusively known now as the inventor and main author of The Spectator, probably the most widely read and imitated prose work of the eighteenth century, Addison also produced important and influential work across a broad gamut of other literary modes-poems, verse translations, literary criticism, periodical journalism, drama, opera, travel writing. Much of this work is little known nowadays even in specialist academic circles; Addison is often described as the most neglected of the eighteenth century’s major writers. Joseph Addison: Tercentenary Essays sets out to redress that neglect; it is the first essay collection ever published which addresses the full range and variety of his career and writings. Its fifteen chapters fall into three groupings: an initial group of five dealing with Addison’s work in modes other than the literary periodical (poetry, translation, travel writing, drama); a central core of five addressing The Spectator from a variety of disciplinary perspectives (literary-critical, sociological and political, bibliographical); and a final set of five exploring Addison’s reception within several cultural spheres (philosophy, horticulture, art history) by individual writers (Samuel Johnson) or across larger historical periods (the Romantic age, the Victorian age), and in Britain and Europe (especially France). Joseph Addison: Tercentenary Essays provides an overdue and appropriately diverse memorial to one of the eighteenth century’s dominant men of letters.

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