scholarly journals Johnson and the Eighteenth–Century Periodical Essay: A Corpus–Based Approach

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 21-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Brocklebank
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Empirical Support ◽  
Jonathan Swift ◽  
Joseph Addison ◽  
Keyword Analysis ◽  
Sentence Patterns ◽  
Periodical Essay

The style of Samuel Johnson’s essays for the periodicals The Rambler, The Adventurer and The Idler is quite different from that of earlier eighteenth–century essayists such as Joseph Addison and Jonathan Swift. However, despite advances in recent years in corpus–based stylistic approaches to texts, a comparison of these three authors using current corpus–analytic techniques has yet to be attempted. This paper reports on the first stages of such a project. Johnson’s essays are compared with Addison and Swift’s essays using WordSmith Tools 5, and an analysis of keywords, semantic groupings of keywords, and key collocations of keywords in Johnson’s essays are identified. It is argued that a keyword analysis brings to the fore grammatical aspects of Johnsonian sentence patterns and provides empirical support for what have hitherto been only intuitively–based statements regarding his style. Also, further patterns in the data will be identified through a phraseological analysis of the essays focusing on the most common four–word clusters (4–grams) that Johnson uses.

Mr Spectator and the Doctor

2021 ◽  
pp. 40-60
Author(s):  
Brian Cowan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
College Life ◽  
Joseph Addison ◽  
Patron Saint ◽  
The Glorious Revolution

Joseph Addison and Henry Sacheverell were almost exact contemporaries. Born within two years of one another, both men attended Magdalen College, Oxford in their youth, and they both took up their studies at the college in the wake of the Glorious Revolution. From this moment onward, the lives and public careers of Addison and Sacheverell would be curiously intertwined. Scholarship and college life would bring them together as friends, but politics and public fame would pull them apart. A contrast between the agreeable Addison and the distasteful Sacheverell is commonplace in eighteenth-century studies, and not without reason. As perhaps the chief proponent of a new culture of ‘politeness’ for post-revolutionary Britain, Addison is well known for his friendliness, if not perhaps for his volubility, in company. Addison’s powerful reputation as the patron saint of eighteenth-century politeness did not sit well with his ties to Sacheverell, whose firebrand reputation was deeply controversial in his lifetime and only declined further as time went by. For this reason, the youthful friendship of the two Magdalen scholars has been a source of awkwardness for later commentators. This chapter places the friendship between Addison and Sacheverell within the context of post-revolutionary political and literary culture.

Addison as Translator

2021 ◽  
pp. 18-39
Author(s):  
David Hopkins
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
College Life ◽  
Joseph Addison ◽  
Patron Saint ◽  
The Glorious Revolution

Joseph Addison and Henry Sacheverell were almost exact contemporaries. Born within two years of one another, both men attended Magdalen College, Oxford, in their youth, and they both took up their studies at the college in the wake of the Glorious Revolution. From this moment onward, the lives and public careers of Addison and Sacheverell would be curiously intertwined. Scholarship and college life would bring them together as friends, but politics and public fame would pull them apart. A contrast between the agreeable Addison and the distasteful Sacheverell is commonplace in eighteenth-century studies, and not without reason. As perhaps the chief proponent of a new culture of ‘politeness’ for post-revolutionary Britain, Addison is well known for his friendliness, if not perhaps for his volubility, in company. Addison’s powerful reputation as the patron saint of eighteenth-century politeness did not sit well with his ties to Sacheverell, whose firebrand reputation was deeply controversial in his lifetime and only declined further as time went by. For this reason, the youthful friendship of the two Magdalen scholars has been a source of awkwardness for later commentators. This chapter places the friendship between Addison and Sacheverell within the context of post-revolutionary political and literary culture

Miss C——y’s Cabinet of Curiosities

The Closet ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 114-147
Author(s):  
Danielle Bobker
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Complex Dynamics ◽  
Jonathan Swift ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Partial Inclusion ◽  
The Face ◽  
The One ◽  
Cabinet Of Curiosities

This chapter points out, according to Anthony Hamilton and Jonathan Swift, how closets can still represent the highly circumscribed sociability associated with the face-to-face exchange of handwritten manuscripts. It talks about the hundreds of books that are designated as closets or cabinets that had been published in Britain by the end of the eighteenth century. As the authors and editors of these printed closets and cabinets nervously underscored their own close connections to courtly closets, prayer closets, and elite cabinets of curiosity, they implicitly positioned their readers as illegitimate intruders or spies. The chapter also reviews the complex dynamics of partial inclusion that are directly addressed in a particularly self-reflexive instance. It emphasizes that the one-way mode of visual intimacy channeled the excitement and social disorientation that accompanied the increasing accessibility of knowledge in the eighteenth century.

The Politics of Parody

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Francis Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
William Shakespeare ◽  
John Milton ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Jonathan Swift ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Political World ◽  
Novel Approach ◽  
The Relationship

This book explores how the works of William Shakespeare, John Milton, Jonathan Swift, and others were taken up by caricaturists as a means of helping the eighteenth-century British public make sense of political issues, outrages, and personalities. The first in-depth exploration of the relationship between literature and visual satire in this period, the book explores how great texts, seen through the lens of visual parody, shape how we understand the political world. It offers a fascinating, novel approach to literary history.

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