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The year is 1709. England has left the turmoils of civil war behind, the unprecedented assassination of a monarch and the foreign take-over of the kingdom.The Glorious Revolution belongs in the past. But the consequences linger. London society has turned into a seismograph for political strife, commercial excess and moral decadence. The remedy? Periodical public censorship by two of England's most prominent moral and aesthetic reformers, and polite connoiseurs – Richard Steele and Joseph Addison. Through their periodicals The Tatler and The Spectator respectively Steele and Addison find a way to re-fashion English morals and to make a media success of it. Building up on the genre of the question-answer periodical of the previous century, Steele and Addison turn the essay periodical into a highly marketable and publicly influential form of literature.
The seminar aims at filtering out the specificities that made this genre so popular and the corresponding discourses – both on moral-philosophical and aesthetic grounds – that made a lasting contribution to establishing the canon of eighteenth-century English literature.
A reader with a selection of the essays to be discussed will be made available at the beginning of term.
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