James Thomson

In questo contributo esamino l'influsso esercitato su Ugo Foscolo dalla riflessione filosofico-estetica e storico-artistica del suo tempo. Ho anche individuato alcune fonti europee che, sulla base di elenchi di testi letti compilati da Foscolo, potrebbero aver avuto un impatto sulla sua opera.

The attitude toward nature in James Thomson’s "The Seasons" has not been duly noted by literary commentators. Instead, the reception of "The Seasons" in modern literary criticism has focused on all sorts of aspects, ranging from visual imagery, to “dislocation, deformity and renewal.” However, when nature as a theme in the poem has been tackled, critics have favored its religious implications—specifically, those pertaining to the historical period in English literature, as well as a number of hypotheses about Thomson’s own relation toward god—over Thomson’s conception of nature on its own terms. Furthermore, none has, in my view, concentrated enough on the most emblematic characteristic of "The Seasons": its unresolved stance toward the natural and its strongly polarized attitude toward it. The aim of this essay is to examine these inconsistencies in order to reveal what they tell us about the period’s changing perspectives, to place "The Seasons"’ reception of the natural in the history of eighteenth-century literature, and to uncover the implications and fertile consequences of Thomson’s view of nature—which spill into para-literary domains.

Drawing on the methods of textual and reception studies, book history, print culture research, and visual culture, this interdisciplinary study of James Thomson’s The Seasons (1730) understands the text as marketable commodity and symbolic capital which throughout its extended affective presence in the marketplace for printed literary editions shaped reading habits. At the same time, through the addition of paratexts such as memoirs of Thomson, notes, and illustrations, it was recast by changing readerships, consumer fashions, and ideologies of culture. The book investigates the poem’s cultural afterlife by charting the prominent place it occupied in the visual cultures of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. While the emphasis of the chapters is on printed visual culture in the form of book illustrations, the book also features discussions of paintings and other visual media such as furniture prints. Reading illustrations of iconographic moments from The Seasons as paratextual, interpretive commentaries that reflect multifarious reading practices as well as mentalities, the chapters contextualise the editions in light of their production and interpretive inscription. They introduce these editions’ publishers and designers who conceived visual translations of the text, as well as the engravers who rendered these designs in the form of the engraving plate from which the illustration could then be printed. Where relevant, the chapters introduce non-British illustrated editions to demonstrate in which ways foreign booksellers were conscious of British editions of The Seasons and negotiated their illustrative models in the sets of engraved plates they commissioned for their volumes.

In this paper I argue for two things. First, many concerns we have regarding privacy—both regarding what things we do and do not want to protect in its name—can be explained through an account of our moral (legal and ethical) rights. Second, to understand a further set of moral (ethical and legal) concerns regarding privacy—especially the temptation to want to intrude on and disrespect others’ privacy and the gravity of such breaches and denials of privacy—we must appreciate the way in which protecting freedom requires us to take into account the sociality of human nature. I draw on Kant’s practical philosophy—his moral accounts of freedom (of virtue and of right) as well as of human nature and evil—to make these arguments.

Science and Religion represent two great systems of human thought. For most people on our planet, religion is the predominant influence over the conduct of their affairs. When science impinges on their lives, it does so not at the intellectual level but practically, through technology. The British astronomer, Sir A. S. Eddington, insists that religion has become possible for a man of science because the philosophic trend of scientific thought has been startlingly redirected by the discoveries of men like Einstein, Heisenberg and Bohr in the fields of relativity and quantum physics. Some of the greatest scientists have succeeded in synthesizing the two disciplines inwardly, on a personal level. Religious experience is then seen as an extension of scientific activity.

Jelen tanulmány a XIX. századi angol festészet „zászlóshajójának” számító Turner életművében vizsgálja meg az irodalmiság/líraiság és a vizualitás/képi allegória párhuzamos jelenlétét, esetlehetőségeit. A tanulmány röviden bemutatja a művész még ma is festészeti életműve mögé sorolt, kevesebbet emlegetett irodalmi munkásságát, mely számos módon érintkezik a Turner-oeuvre ismert, elismert, múzeumokban felkereshető anyagával. A szöveg alaptézise, hogy Turner, a költő sokat köszönhetett a festő Turnernek, ahogyan megfordítva is éppilyen igaz a kijelentés. A tanulmány szimultán műelemzései segítségével bizonyítja szemlélet és olvasás együttes jelenlétének, beemelésének fontosságát a Turner-mű befogadása esetén. A közreadott tanulmány részlet a szerzőnek egy terjedelmesebb, a parergonalitásról (a keret(ezés) problémájáról) szóló, összehasonlító irodalomtudományi jellegű munkájából.

Percival Stockdale, the critic-rival of Samuel Johnson, is better known today as a footnote in Johnson scholarship than for his own work as note-maker. This essay recovers Stockdale’s achievement as annotator by focusing on the notes, along with the dedication, that Stockdale contributed to Archibald Hamilton’s 1793 edition of James Thomson’s The Seasons. Aimed less to explicate The Seasons than refute Johnson’s unenthusiastic “Life of Thomson” (1780), Stockdale’s apparatus constructs Thomson as a “glorious CALEDONIAN poet,” a poet in an anti-Unionist, nationalist literary tradition rooted in a mythic past of Scottish independence.  Far from expressing Stockdale’s personal views on Scotland, the notes utilized nationalist language to signal his critical distance from Johnson while also invalidating Johnson’s “Life of Thomson” as an anti-Scots text.  In this way, Stockdale’s notes complicate scholarly truisms about eighteenth-century Scottish-Anglo antagonisms, revealing “Caledonianism” to be a complex rhetorical posture.  Still, whatever their function, we cannot overlook that Stockdale’s paratexts had some impact on the perceptions of Thomson among readers.  Stockdale’s overlooked labor as annotator contributes in a small way to the shift in the 1790s from a view of Thomson as “English” poet to Thomson as Scottish poet.

This essay by modern poet Edouard d'Araille ('Words Can't Hold...', 'Love Immortal', 'Ground Zero') investigates the nature of art and poetry and in particular the relation of the latter to time. Though a consideration of the thoughts of numerous poets and writers Edouard d'Araille explores what it could be that makes poetry artistic and how it is that the way time is represented in poetry is of significance. He begins with the reflections of Rupert Brooke and Joh Keats on poetry and extends his discussion to embrace the views of a dozen major poetic authors. The essay is both theoretical and emotional in scope, and though it does not aim to lay down a 'theory of poetry' it does indicate some valuable lines of exploration in the understanding of what makes poetry work, what makes poetry move us, and what makes poetry cause us to reflect on our lives and time in a different way than normal. This essay was originally published as the Introduction to an anthology of poetry (of the same title) that follows poetry over a period of 2500 years in its manifold representations of time, emotions and thought. Though it is of benefit to read the essay in conjunction with that volume, the introduction does stand alone as a piece of writing on the art of poetry. It is taken from the 2006 Digital Version of 'The Poetry of Living Time'.

Embedding James Thomson's popular long poem The Seasons (1730) in the print cultural contexts of the 1780s and 1790s, the essay examines the text's extensive afterlife and studies different printed responses to the production. Specifically, it investigates, among a range of material culture spin-offs and visual adaptations, a selection of fine-printed editions (and their paratextual interpretation of Thomson's classic) targeted at middle-to upper-class consumers, the high-cultural furniture print of scenes fromg The Seasons by Angellica Kauffman, and the appropriation of Thomson's work by Thomas Stothard, one of the most popular book illustrators at the end of the eighteenth century, for two numbers of the ephemeral diary-cum-almanac, The Royal Engagement Pocket Atlas.

One of the more divisive critical debates that has characterized the reception of James Thomson’s famous locodescriptive poem The Seasons (1726–30) has centered around the question of the poem’s social vision. One strain of critical responses sees the poem indulging a solipsism that obscures the suffering of the poor in a newly commercialized Britain, whereas other responses see the poem as setting forth a vision of social harmony and a critique of social conditions. In this piece, I argue that, for Thomson, the feeling of melancholy—a mood that performs solitude, genial pensiveness, and sympathy—stages the difficulty of knowing how to sympathize with the rural poor or how to protest the social conditions that lead to poverty, and aestheticizes social life so as better to understand it. To abstract social conditions under the aegis of a stylized melancholy is to run the risk of mischaracterizing or even evading those conditions. Crucially, though, for Thomson, melancholic feeling is not in itself the solution to social problems, but is important because of its staging of the difficulties of critical responses to those problems. The lesson of Thomson’s melancholy is that solutions to social problems do not always emerge straightforwardly, but instead in awkward fits and starts. In this way, I argue, the potentially inoperative nature of the critical positions put forth by the melancholic mood may also be the very sign of their force.

Rather than focus on the examination of James Thomson’s poetic description in The Seasons, this essay investigates the poet’s image-making processes in the anthropocentric interpolated episodes of Celadon and Lavinia, Damon and Musidora, Palemon and Lavinia, and the story of the Perishing Man. It examines the capacity of Thomson’s different types of multidimensional images to convey moments of stasis and mobility, concentration and process, as well as stagnation and petrifaction. Thomson’s images are inscribed with spatial and temporal matrices in order to create different patterns of variety that underpin his complex poetics of action and description.

In a reading of James Thomson's The Seasons that largely draws on the history of the book and the fields of print culture and illustration studies, I offer a narrative of the changing interpretation of the poem between 1730 and 1797. Not only did readers, in response to changes in zeitgeist, alter their consumption and reading practices of the text, but they also interpreted the poem by translating it into a range of different media such as furniture prints, porcelain designs, sculpture, and book illustrations. I shall examine different responses to Thomson's poem by discussing a number of illustrations that were printed in editions, published both in London and the newly emerging regional publishing centers but disseminated across Britain. Apart from documenting the representational shift from depicting the poem as theodicy to reading it as a narrative of nature and domesticity, I shall relate my discussion of the illustrations to changes in technology, the reading revolution, and the skillful marketing strategies of both cheaply produced and luxurious editions of The Seasons in the late eighteenth century. By contextualizing the production within a new midcentury book trade that catered to different classes of readers, the essay makes a contribution to understanding Thomson's text as a cultural classic of iconic significance that was being reinvented (in ever new media and interpretations) throughout the second half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries.