Recent Articles

129 Spring 2007 Vol. XXXIX, No. 2 RECENT ARTICLES* ADDISON ASCARI, MAURIZIO. ‘‘The Role of Addison ’s Dream Visions and Oriental Tales in the Nascent Poetics of Short Fiction,’’ Textus, 18 (2005), 11–23. Addison transformed preexisting literary genres—the fable, the dream vision , and the oriental tale—to fit in tone and substance an essay format. His ‘‘fictional essays’’ in the Tatler, the Spectator , and the Guardian generally have a didactic purpose, while they also establish him (and Steele) as two of the putative parents of the short story. Mr. Ascari’s essay is more descriptive and appreciative than analytical and critical. BRIGGS, PETER M. ‘‘Joseph Addison and the Art of Listening: Birdsong, Italian Opera, and the Music of the English Tongue,’’ AJ, 16 (2005), 157–176. Far from lacking musical taste as detractors have urged, Addison, Mr. Briggs argues, possessed an inclusively psychological musicality that confirms his cultural criticism. Besides promoting concerts and vocal music, he appreciated the sounds of London streets and the countryside as well as the registers of *Unsigned reviews are by the editors. the human voice. He championed the affective powers of church music, songbirds , and the tonalities of voices and transcribed speech. His satire of Italian opera was based on his cultural sense of music—on the distinct tones of English and Italian—and on his belief that fitting text to music composed for another language was incongruous. For Addison , the man of ordinary ear has as much auditory sensibility as the professional musician, and the plain citizen can detect linguistic and chromatic clashes in opera. While Addison, like Swift, lamented grammatical trends, he knew that language belongs to its speakers and that there are many versions of English rather than one model. Although appalled by urban noise and verbal inanity, he admired the audible energy of daily life; and despite his skepticism about translation, he believed the Hebrew Bible had introduced into English a measured harmony that heightened devotional power. Hebraic musicality enabled English people to develop subjective responses to prayer and to find social solidarity in their responses . For Mr. Briggs, musicality enhanced Addison’s cultural criticism; it 130 reflects his closeness to his public and his willingness both to take materials from readers and to teach them social values. Addison trusted the common reader without needing to pride himself on theoretical consistency, and this trust owes much to his musical sensibility. Mr. Briggs’s article nicely imitates the casual mode of Addison’s essays as a way of apologizing for the latter ’s commonsense literary and cultural criticism. The article’s argumentative thread foregrounds subjective experience and the association of ideas, topics that Hume and Sterne laughed to scorn. Addison may be an appropriate model with which to fault the specialist discourse of academic criticism, but to present him simply as a popular psychologist is anachronistic. Since Addison belittled musical rhetoric and its inclusion of tradition and intersubjectivity, Mr. Briggs’s imitative rhetoric does not exactly fit his view of Addison’s psychology . Implicit in Mr. Briggs’s stance is an awareness of how sense transference applies to perception. Our senses in operating simultaneously inform one another, as the concept of synesthesia developed by semantics and cognitive science shows. Many eighteenth-century writers went beyond Addison in relating perception to the sister arts and synesthesia , Blake perhaps most spectacularly . Doubtless, we should admire Addison ’s audience building, but standards for popularization are historical and, therefore, always evolving. Robert James Merrett University of Alberta PETTITT, TOM. ‘‘From Stage to Folk: A Note on the Passages from Addison’s Rosamond in the ‘Truro’ Mummers Play,’’ Folklore, 114 (August 2003), 262–270. Mr. Pettitt follows R. J. E. Tiddy’s evidently redoubtable account of the transposition of lines from Rosamond to the ‘‘‘Truro’ Mummers Play.’’ His own contribution comprises reasonable thoughts on ‘‘the purposes to which the lines were put in the Truro play’’ and bibliographically sound (and interesting) conjectures about ‘‘how they got there.’’ Regrettably, a more sophisticated analysis of the note is nearly impossible, given Mr. Pettitt’s decision not to tell us what the ‘‘‘Truro’ Mummers Play’’ was—or, given the quotation marks around the place-name, where it was...