Recent Articles

ADDISON

Mackenzie, Alan T. “The Corrosion of Idle Discontent: Semantics and Syntax at Work in Company and in Print to Prevent the Spectator and the Rambler from Dwindling into Flâneurs,” An Expanding Universe: The Project of Eighteenth-Century Studies, Essays Commemorating the Career of Jim Springer Borck, ed. Kevin L. Cope and Cedric D. Reverand II. Norwalk, CT: AMS, 2017. Pp. 287–328.

Mr. Mackenzie proposes a retrospective strategy, using nineteenth- and twentieth-century ideas of the flâneur, the disengaged yet intensely aware urban stroller, to frame an appreciation of more personally engaged observers of the city in Gay’s Trivia, Addison and Steele’s Spectator Papers, and Johnson’s Rambler, Idler, and Adventurer essays. At first glance, this dramatic contrast and roundabout method, working at length through Baudelaire and his aesthetic heirs, seem both “too easy” and needlessly elaborate. And yet, Mr. Mackenzie’s approach encourages careful analysis of the sociable qualities of the English observers and their strategies for reaching out to readers.

As Mr. Mackenzie explains, the flâneur’s posture toward urban experience expresses at once a philosophy and psychology of aesthetic pleasures to be gathered and savored. The flâneur is an artist of sorts who treasures the random otherness of the city, its chance encounters and momentary impressions, and its dreamlike or fantastic qualities. He (almost always male and a gentleman) is not antisocial but decidedly asocial, driven by curiosity and engaged primarily by his impressions as ends worthy in themselves.

Mr. Mackenzie points out that the flâneur’s English predecessors were more outward-looking, sociable, and down to earth. Gay represented London as a city intriguing in its variety of people, places, and sensations but simultaneously as a gritty scene of social degradation and occasional danger. The Spectator found interest in city people’s tendency to sort themselves into conversational communities such as clubs and friendly societies based on shared values, interests, and vocabularies. It also prompted readers to see the urban setting as a speculative space where a thoughtful person might learn to appreciate the character and enterprise of many individuals, all contributing their own bit to a functioning whole. Of course, the Spectator itself stood both in style and in substance as an ongoing invitation to readers to find their place in this sociable design.

Samuel Johnson’s commitment to conversable company was equally strong but realized in a different way. As others have, Mr. Mackenzie singles out for appreciation Johnson’s empathetic grasp of the minds and moral outlooks of others, even amid the anonymity of the city. He also praises Johnson’s characteristic mindfulness in company, that is, his interest in the workings of all minds, his own and others’, and the ways in which minds seek to maintain moral orientation and mental equilibrium. Johnson never met a flâneur but he knew from personal experience the seductiveness of self-indulgence, a “corrosion of idle discontent” to be avoided.

BEHN

Gallagher, Noelle Dückmann. “The Embarrassments of Restoration Panegyric: Reconsidering an Unfashionable Genre,” ECL, 39.3 (2015), 33–54.

The Restoration panegyric is rarely noticed, much less afforded serious analysis. Ms. Gallagher remedies this with a brilliant three-part study, first of the panegyric in general and then through a probing analysis of Swift’s Athenian Society ode and Behn’s threnody for her dead king, Charles II. In the first part, Ms. Gallagher studies the overlapping elements of history, epic, and panegyric, noting that the latter struggles to “reconcile two very different literary goals: the need to record a ‘real’ human past, and the need to celebrate timeless ideals.” She notes that the panegyric tends to embarrass the reader since it is hyperbolic rather than satirical and “mercenary” in its overt pursuit of patronage. This first section lays out strategies for reading these important cultural artifacts, especially through understanding the use of apostrophe and personification in celebrating a noble public figure and his (rarely her) allegedly noble deeds and the panegyric’s broader goal of promoting public...