Addison as Critic and Critical Theorist

Abstract

In the first half of the twentieth century Addison’s literary-critical and theoretical works were understood as early formulations of a literary aesthetics, as important theoretical statements on wit and imagination, as pioneering exercises in the analysis and sponsorship of vernacular literary texts, as influential popularizations of philosophical ideas. These writings have in recent decades, however, been less regularly a subject of attention. Indeed, in the 1980s and 1990s Addison’s essays in literary criticism and theory were often treated as though they were covert works of political ideology, as affirmations of ‘a hierarchic Chain of Seeing’. This essay takes Addison at his literary-critical word. It stresses the epistemological, rather than the sensational, elements in Addison’s critical theorizing. In particular, it argues that Addison the critic was fundamentally concerned with recognizably Aristotelian pleasures of mimesis. As readers we take a double mimetic pleasure, not only from our recognition of literature’s imitations of the natural world but also from our recognition of the contextual particulars—political, historical, literary, discursive—which inform writings of earlier times.