Joseph Addison: His Biographical and Critical Reputation in the Middle and Late 18th Century

FAIN: FR-10262-78

Robert M. Otten
Indiana University, Kokomo (Kokomo, IN 46902-3557)

To study the processes of what standards were used to write literary history and how biographical data was assembled in the middle and late 18th century, by reading and analyzing the critical reputation and early biographies of the Augustan essayist and politician Joseph Addison, a commentator of the last half of the century. Addison’s international repute made his contemporaries—for instance Swift— aware that he was England's first man of letters. Thus the Continental concept that a life spent in writing was a dignified profession supplanted the native English view of authorship as either public hack work or private artistry.