Nature and Imagination

This chapter explores Addison’s attempt at opening new perspectives for the convocation of the work of imagination in the production and reception of representation. Developing a new, dynamic understanding of the concept of pleasure, he explains how the works of nature and art acquire more value as they allow the imagination or the fancy some scope for the picturing and mapping of new territories. The chapter then suggests how some of the new forms of expression in Enlightenment England (the novel, the landscape garden, Hogarth’s series of images), all based on a form of sequentiality similar in many ways to that present in the periodical essays, proposed progressive, enhancing apprehensions of nature which allowed the emergence of a more dynamic, less abstract sort of beauty, designed to create pleasure in the meaning defined by Addison.