Storytelling in the Spectators / Storytelling dans les spectateurs

In “Embroidering the loose Dress of the Spartan Maids—Text, Sex, and Textile for Joseph Addison”, Amélie Junqua unravels the various threads of a single story first narrated by Plutarch, and twice reported by Addison in his periodical essays. From its first telling in the primary source to its reappearance in Addisonian prose, the story has acquired quite a few layers, causing heated but rather pointless debates among classical scholars. Retold by Pierre Bayle in his Dictionnaire with all its interpretations, the anecdote becomes a focal point from which to gauge the attention commanded by feminine clothing at the start of the 18th century. When feminine garments become the subject of male scrutiny, textile and text are one, and the female body, an object in absentia, only revealed through and by a surface.

In “Stories of Authorship, Politics, and Friendship: Hugh Kelly, Oliver Goldsmith, and the Babler”, Michael Griffin focuses his analysis on the Babler of Hugh Kelly, which was a collection of essays originally serialised in Owen’s Weekly Chronicle from February 1763 until June 1767. Griffin describes the inception and development of that weekly publishing venture, drawing particular attention to the magazine’s coverage of three topics in particular: the plight of the professional author in the still burgeoning, post-Spectator market for periodical essay writing; the nature of party politics and the economic wellbeing of nations; and the nature of friendship. Goldsmith’s dramatic career would come to be shadowed by the unhappy jealousy that it created with Kelly, but their mutual work in the world of Grub Street periodicals saw the two Irishmen co-operate, however briefly, on the Babler. In that magazine, Kelly fashioned a Spectator-style venture which was timely in its commentaries on the modernising worlds of authorship and politics.

The spectatorial work of Justus van Effen, composed in French, is the topic of the contribution of Yvonne Völkl, who addresses the constructions of national stereotypes in Van Effen’s writings. With the topic of “Narrating the Self, Narrating the Other”, Yvonne Völkl takes a look at storytelling in general and at the transmission of stories through media. She also addresses the questions of how and to what extent national stereotypes were developed in this context and the manner in which the author constructed his Dutch self in contrast to other European nations in his francophone adaptations of the Spectator.

José de Kruif applies a metholodology of “distant reading” to the magazine and offers some examples of textmining in her essay on “Quantifying Spectators”. Through some examples of Dutch Spectators, the Hollandsche Spectator (1732‒1735) of Justus van Effen and De Denker (1763‒1764) by the Mennonite vicar Cornelius van Engelen, de Kruif demonstrates the ways in which new digital methods can add to our knowledge of the genre. Although relatively few articles in Dutch Spectators are presented as storytelling, there are many narratives incorporated into the much more common treatises in these texts. José de Kruif suggests that analysis of a sufficient number of treatises might bring up approaches that will also be suited for a sufficiently large corpus of “special” genres in Spectators (e.g. dream-narratives).

Of a similar cultural moment, but in French, Klaus-Dieter Ertler analyses the migrations of a narrative practice in La Spectatrice danoise of Laurent Angliviel de la Beaumelle. It is interesting to observe how at the end of the spectatorial genre in Protestant areas (1749–1750), a young Frenchman went to Copenhagen to “civilize” Scandinavian culture by means of the moral press. He created a female voice within a Danish background in order to discuss basic forms of behavior and knowledge, following Protestant ethics, with a clear orientation to the contemporary Freemason’s worldview.

In “Radical Storytelling in the Age of Revolution: Norway’s Provinzialblade” Aina Nøding focuses on Norway’s first major literary critic and journalist, Claus F. Fasting, who singlehandedly published a weekly periodical called Provinzialblade (Provincial Journal; 1778–1781) for four years in his hometown of Bergen. His magazine (which exhibits some traits of the Spectator) presented original and translated texts on a variety of topics and genres, overtly promoting quite radical enlightenment ideas to a conservative readership. Many of the stories were authored by Voltaire and Montesquieu, as well as some which were set amidst the ongoing American War of Independence. Nøding argues that these stories make up important and strategic elements of Fasting’s larger political discourse on liberty, reason and moral sentiment.

“On Searching and Finding: Narratives in the Medical Weekly Der Tirolische Arzt” is the title of Misia Doms’s essay, which brings up another type of spectatorial writing in the 18th century, that of the medical weeklies. These papers form one of the most influential spin-offs of the enlightened Spectator project—next to journals for children and for female readers, or literary weeklies. By analysing the famous German periodical Der Arzt as well as its nearly forgotten Austrian counterpart Der Tirolische Arzt, the present paper gives an overview of the large range of storytelling devices used in medical weeklies: Micronarratives, which present only a narrative nucleus inserted in general medical reflections, can be found next to detailed stories of sickness and healing with individual characters, climactic developments and/or unexpected turns. Alongside stories and micronarratives Misia Doms finds in these papers a rudimentary poetics of medical narration.

One of the last Spectators of France, published before, during and after the French Revolution by Jacques-Vincent Delacroix, constitutes the corpus of Hélène Boons. She analyses the problem of the fictional author or editor in “The shattered Mask: Fortunes and Misfortunes of Fiction in Jacques-Vincent Delacroix’s ‘Spectators’ on both sides of the French Revolution”. For Boons, the author and magistrate Delacroix proves to be a rewarding resource when it comes to providing a diachronic approach to the Spectator genre. The author modified the form he has selected according to the political storms he endured and his choices affect both the relationship between speech and narration and the generic device of an authorial identity in disguise. The present study offers hypotheses to understand why the spectatorial voice slowly quietened during the 19th century. The core of the problem is to be found in the role granted by this particular type of periodical press to storytelling and, more broadly, to fiction.

Katarzyna Chlewicka contributes “Embedded in the Mainstream of Argumentation: Narratives in Die mühsame Bemerckerin”, in which she studies an early Polish adaptation of the first spectators, written in German, which appeared around 1735 in the city of Gdansk. The journal privileges explicitly the genre of the story as a didactic and rhetorical concept. It does so using an “authoritative narrative style” and employing representative characters. Here, storytelling is also an object of meta-reflections concerning constitutive features of Spectator-stories such as the fictitious and/or the fabular.

In his contribution, Václav Smyčka explains the “Transformation of Stories in Bohemian Spectators and the Problem of Observing Characters’ Minds”. His article deals with the transformations of poetics and narrative structure in fictional prose of that area. The genre emerged there in the 1770s and influenced its traditional fictional prose. It was characterised by new kinds of digression, new sociolects and ideolects, which atomized previous prose fictional genres like the exemplum, anecdote, or the chapbook. However, the new poetics cultivated by later spectators, which included a greater sentimentalism, as well as ideas of the French enlightenment novel and “Sturm und Drang”, helped to reduce the contingency of fictional prose and to re-establish a lost coherence. These two transformations signal the emergence of the modern short story in the spectators and other literary journals.

Elisabeth Hobisch studies the function of the dream visions in the Spanish Spectators and argues that the authors of the genre developed their own style of dream narration and made use of its aesthetic characteristics for their specific goals. They were confronted with two traditions of dream narrations, the spectatorial and the local, and they managed to combine these two traditions in very amusing ways. Even if the structure elaborated by the authors of the first Spectator-models was maintained by many Spanish authors, Elisabeth Hobisch brings up examples of completely different uses of the dream and critical discussions of them.

Inmaculada Urzainqui analyzes the histories and tales contained in the Corresponsal del Censor, published fortnightly in Madrid, from May 1786 to June 1788 by Manuel Rubín de Celis, one of the most original Spanish Spectators. The essay studies its epistolary character and the ambiguity of its expressive voice. After an explication of its particularities and objectives, Inmaculada Urzainqui demonstrates two types of micronarrations, where the medium engages emotionally with the reader in order to bring a major plasticity to the expression of its ideas: those referring to the situation of the author, and those narrated by the author’s supposed correspondents.