“I have acted in all the parts of my Life as a Looker-on, which is the Character I intend to preserve in this Paper. […] I shall publish a Sheet full of Thoughts every Morning, for the Benefit of my Contemporaries.” Thus does “Mr.Spectator” launch the The Spectator, a collective venture led by Richard Addison and Richard Steele in 1711-1712, briefly revived in 1714, immensely influential in its time and beyond through its reading in private homes and public coffee-houses, its republications, selections, translations, ubiquitous quotation and allusions. The format of a c.2,500 word essay published six times a week on a societal topic such as manners, gender, fashion, aesthetics, the fashioning of Britishness, has resonated ever since, in and outside fiction, with surprising echoes in today’s opinion essays and periodicals, on paper and online. In this seminar we will examine the literary and cultural context of a selection of the original essays and explore the reverberation of The Spectator over some 300 years.

Recommended editions :
The Commerce of Everyday Life: Selections from the Tatler and the Spectator (Bedford Cultural Editions)
OR
Selections from The Tatler and The Spectator (Penguin Classics)
Several online editions are available.
Bibliography:
Bony, Alain. Joseph Addison & Richard Steele: The Spectator et l’essai périodique. Paris: Didier Erudition, 1999.
Donatini, Hilary Teynor. “‘Much Might Be Said on Both Sides’: Mr. Spectator in Sir Roger de Coverley’s Worcestershire.” Eighteenth-Century Life, vol. 45, no. 1, Jan. 2021, pp. 1–20. doi:10.1215/00982601-8793912.
Mackie, Erin. Market à la Mode: Fashion, Commodity, and Gender in The Tatler and The Spectator. Baltimore & London: John Hopkins, 1997.

A Moodle class will be available by the beginning of September 2021.