Description

Overview:

The Spectator is the most famous work of journalism of the eighteenth century in English. It set the pattern for a kind of essay writing that persists to the present day. Comparatively short but thorough essays on topics of interest to middle-class readers (politics, fashion, the arts), written in a clear and straightforward style without partisanship or professional jargon: this is a mode that is still standard in print and online journalism. A collaboration between Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator has in our time been credited with being essential to the formation of what the sociologist Jürgen Habermas has influentially dubbed “the bourgeois public sphere.” Habermas describes the bourgeois public sphere as being made up of private individuals coming together to constitute a public, in this case a public that was not affiliated with the government or the church, but an independent body that could discuss important issues on its own. Gathered together in coffee houses, over tea tables, or simply in their studies, readers of The Spectator were among the first to have a print publication that became a common frame of reference for middle-class English-speaking people; it set an agenda and a way of thinking about society and the arts that seemed derived, not from the aristocracy or the church, but from the shared world of the readers themselves.

Subject:

English Language Arts

Level:

College / Upper Division

Material Type:

Reading

Author:

Joseph Addison, Richard Steele

Provider:

The Open Anthology of Literature in English

Date Added:

07/10/2017