Explore the vast range of titles available.

Jane Austen is celebrated for her wit and wittiness. She famously defended novels in Northanger Abbey, for example, on the basis that they display ‘the liveliest effusions of wit’. Critics have long been occupied with detailing the implications of Austen’s wit, but without due attention to Austen’s own explicit deployment of the word within her writing. Offering a re-evaluation of Austen’s use of ‘wit’, this article provides a much-needed examination of how the term is implemented by Austen in her fiction (from her juvenilia, and through her six major novels), contextualises wit’s meaning through its seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century senses, and reveals that ‘wit’ did not necessarily have the positive connotations often presumed in modern suppositions. It transpires that, seemingly paradoxically, Austen routinely adopts the label ‘wit’ ironically to expose an absence of true wit, whilst concurrently avoiding the application of the word in moments displaying true wit. This article argues for the need to understand the crucial distinction between wit and true wit in Austen’s fiction.

Joseph Addison's 1713 play, Cato: A Tragedy, dramatizes the final days of Cato the Younger's resistance to Julius Caesar before his eventual suicide at Utica in 46 BC. Although Addison initially seems to present Cato as a model for emulation, we argue that Addison is ultimately critical of both Cato and the Stoicism he embodies. Via the play's romantic subplot and via his work as an essayist, Addison offers a revision of the Catonic model, reworking it into a gentler model that elevates qualities such as love, friendship, and sympathy and that is more appropriate to the type of peaceful civil and commercial society he wishes to promote.

Stamped with the date on which they first appeared, periodicals are, by definition, time bound and destined to expire shortly after publication. However, the fact that periodically produced works from the eighteenth century survive to this day evidences the form's capacity to take on a sustained life, or an afterlife, beyond the original publication date. This article explores the 'afterlives' of periodical print to consider how readers interacted with periodicals. It focuses largely on the changing materiality of Joseph Addison's periodicals, and what this means for implied reading practices. The article builds on methodologies advanced by book historians to explore how the changing material qualities of periodicals facilitate vibrant textual afterlives. It concludes by offering two case studies, The Covent-Garden Journal (1752) and Common Sense (1737-43). The first of these explores the seeming incongruity in choosing to bind, gild, and extra-illustrate works that are supposedly ephemeral and disposable, while the second examines annotations to reveal who was originally reading issues of Common Sense and where they were doing so.

Through the case of Thomas Parsons, a stone carver in Bath in the second half of the eighteenth century, Lawrence E. Klein explores the way in which an artisan participated in the larger polite and enlightened culture. He shows how, in practical ways, politeness was a competence demanded in the artisan's work life and how, by extension, politeness provided ideals for the project of self-cultivation. At the same time, he shows the constraints and pressures that limited and shaped Parsons's involvement in polite and enlightened culture and the manifest tensions that surrounded it.

Focusing on Joseph Addison's influential Spectator papers, this essay examines the emergence of modern aesthetic theory in the context of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century science. Rather than arising as compensatory form of spirituality in a newly disenchanted world, as is often thought, aesthetics came into being at a time when science understood itself to be doing theological work, uncovering (however provisionally, however incompletely) the divine order of things. These scientific investigations contributed to a vibrant and sophisticated discourse of world contemplation, which, I argue, provided the inspiration and intellectual underpinnings for modern aesthetic theory. First, the new science reinvigorated the classical idea that humans are born to contemplate the cosmos—a project it recast in its own mechanical and physico-theological terms—making a cogent case for the value of world gazing and supplying Addison with a fundamental orientation toward the world: the world is an exquisitely constructed machine, divine in origin, that not only invites and rewards but even demands our reverential attention. Early aesthetics and early science diverged not over metaphysics but over how each contemplated this self-same world, which brings us to science's second crucial contribution to modern aesthetics. Keen to establish itself, the new science highlighted what was distinctive about its mode of contemplation: rather than simply marveling at God's creation, it pried beyond nature's surface to understand its inner workings. Addison, fully persuaded by natural philosophy's distinction between the micromechanical reality of things and their phenomenal appearances, framed aesthetic experience wholly in terms of the latter. Aesthetics, in other words, would concern itself not with things themselves but with the looks of things. What Gadamer decried as Kant's \"radical subjectivization\" of aesthetics thus didn't need to wait for Kant. It was one of the founding moves of modern aesthetics, what distinguished aesthetic from scientific world contemplation from the very start.

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 importância 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 comprometimentos político-partidários, a presença de ensaios críticos sobre a literatura e outras artes, e a relação do periódico com a cultura literária do Classicismo.

An article by Joseph Addison titled Female Dress--Mixture of the Sexes in One Person--Female Equestrians is presented.

This article focuses on the evidence of reading in a sizeable rural book collection, assembled in the first four decades of the eighteenth century in Cumbria by a father and son, Old and Young Ben Browne. Their collection, perhaps the only one of its kind to survive, offers a remarkable insight into the intellectual habits of a middling farming family very far from the metropolitan elites who have dominated the history of reading. The library, containing a wide range of literary, historical, and religious works, provides a test case for the ways we think and talk about amateur readers and the marks they leave behind. The Brownes's books show some readerly habits of their time, traditions of textual improvement, and commonplacing. They also contain evidence of the indexing of works by theme, often in ways that might seem reductive or utilitarian. The article uses the material evidence of marginalia and inscription to interrogate the distinction between reading and misreading and asks what such a library might tell us about amateur domestic culture and the mixed literacies within a remote rural community.

This essay reads Joseph Addison’ views on imagination and on a set of interrelated tropes—wit, metaphor, personification— from the perspective afforded by the interaction view of metaphor. By adopting this analytical standpoint, the essay documents how Addison relies, often unwittingly, on a propositional model of signification in order to put forward his strongest claims on literary language, imagination, and aesthetic judgment. Such a model constitutes a significant departure from Addison’s starting point, the referential model of signification that premises and circumscribes John Locke’s account of rhetorical language. This reading offers not only a synthesizing account of Addison’s views across a range of texts, but it also enables a new and more nuanced placement of Addison in eighteenth-century aesthetics.