The role of title and epigraph in the essay “The Vision of Mirza” by Joseph Addison

The object of this research is the essay “The Vision of Mirza” by Joseph Addison. The relevance of studying J. Addison's essay is substantiated by undue attention to his works in the Russian literary studies, as well as the need for tracing the dynamics in the genre of vision in the Age of Enlightenment. The subject of this research is the title and epigraph as parts of the work that determine its structure and artistic distinctness. Analysis is conducted on the images of the viewer, visionary hero, and his guide, chronotope of the essay and allusive links. The essay is based on the combination of systemic-structural, comparative-historical, and hermeneutic methods. The novelty consists in the fact that the comprehensive examination of the role of the title ensemble within the structure of the essay allows reconstructing the link of the essay with the traditions of the medieval genre of vision manifested in the traditional topic and consistent motifs, imagery system, space and time arrangement, and dialogical structure of the text. The author provides interpretation to the allusive links between J. Addison's essay and Greco-Roman mythology, epic poem “The Aeneid” by Virgil, and psalms from the New Testament, and “The Voyage of St. Brendan”. It is established that the dialogue set by the epigraph passes through the entire plotline of the essay and reveal the characters of its participants. The extensively presented Christian theme alongside the images from ancient mythology and Virgil’s texts are essential for the author to express the enlightening program.

2. Morality

‘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.

Mr Spectator and the Doctor

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

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

Joseph Addison

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.

Addison and France

Born in 1672 in a climate of strong anti-Catholicism and Francophobia in England, yet aware that France was a great source of intellectual and cultural inspiration, Joseph Addison had a complex relationship with the French nation. His works reflect the tensions between his admiration for the rival country and his hatred of the French political regime. This chapter argues that French influence on Addison’s writings and Addison’s ambivalent attitude to France are nowhere more perceptible than in his way of handling the French ‘battle of the books’, the famous ‘querelle des anciens et des modernes’. It also contends that Addison’s ambivalent attitude to the French was not lost on the eighteenth-century French intellectuals who, though they celebrated him as ‘a friend of mankind’, often borrowed his ideas without acknowledging them.

Joseph Addison and the Domestication of Paradise Lost

This chapter examines the profound impact the editorial interventions and elaborate textual notes that Patrick Hume contributed to Tonson’s sixth edition of Paradise Lost in 1695 had on Milton’s status as a popular and accessible writer. Hume’s Annotations on Milton’s Paradise Lost, the first significant editorial treatment of a vernacular poet, acknowledges that a new readership had emerged that needed the kinds of assistance that Milton’s educated Protestant contemporaries had not required when reading the lifetime editions of 1667–9 and 1674. The shift in Milton’s status, from that of an elite-culture writer embedded in a radical political and theological tradition to that of the cultural icon of a broadly conceived English Protestantism, both prompted and was advanced by Joseph Addison’s remarkable series of essays on Paradise Lost in The Spectator.

A Nation within a Nation: English Education as a Tool of Divide and Rule Policy in Colonial India

Famous Irish political scientist and historian, Benedict Anderson, in his book, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism has described nations as imagined communities. Stephen May, the British novelist, playwright, and TV writer, has viewed that language is used as a political tool to strengthen the imagined community of a nation-state. Eventually, many countries have been named after the language predominantly used in a particular country. But during the colonial expansion that the linguistic identity of a colonised nation like India and its people has been transformed in different ways. With the English Education Act, 1835 Lord Bentinck defeated the Orientalists and promoted English education in India. Consequently, different missionaries like Joshua Marshman, William Carey, William Ward, and Alexander Duff, who principally used English education to preach Christianity among the Indians, and British officials like Charles Grant, Lord Macaulay, William Hazlitt, and also some higher-class Indians like Raja Rammohan Roy, Keshab Chandra Sen, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay supported the Anglicist view and tried to spread the English education in India. Different English schools like Dharmatala Academy were built and in the curriculum of different universities, the writings of different English authors like Francis Bacon, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope were included. Many higher-class Indians became more interested in English study losing their interest in vernacular education. Vijay Agnew in her autobiography, Where I Come From, and Madhu Kishor in her article “The Dominance of Angreziyat in Our Education” have accused English education of making them unaware and ignorant of the Indian culture and writings. In this way, the higher-class English educated Indians have created one English nation within the Hindustan. Even the translation of different Indian classical texts into English like Sir William Jone’s translation of Abhjnanasakuntalam in 1789 and Sir Charles Wilkins’ translation of Bhagabadgita in 1784 has also paved the way for forming a different identity. In this context, the present paper aims to show how the different tools for spreading the English language divided the nation into two, supporting the divide and rule policy of the British, which is still effective in the so-called united, equal, and democratic India.

Introduction

When and how did Pope become the literary colossus we know today? Until now scholars of Pope’s early career have focused on his involvement with the so-called ‘Scriblerus Club’ comprising Swift, Arbuthnot, Gay, and Parnell, and the circles of famous authors such as Joseph Addison and William Wycherley. This introduction begins by setting out a new context for understanding Pope’s early career: in the literary circles dominated by the Duke of Buckingham and his friends. It then explains the holistic methodological approach of the book and how its questions intersect with existing scholarship on Pope and his world. This is followed by a brief outline of the chapters.

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

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.