“A New Romantic Canon: ‘Enlightened Romanticism’. Addison’s Rejection of Innatism and ‘The Pleasures of the Imagination’ (1712)”

My article proposes a revision of the periodization and the canon of Romanticism by going back to the roots of key elements of this literary period, in linking together the imagination to the pivotal assumption of the Enlightenment, i.e. the debunking of innatism, as Locke had proposed it. Joseph Addison reworks his theory of the imagination accordingly, in particular, in his Journal «The Spectator», with a series of essays called The Pleasures of the Imagination (1712). Here he affirms that the tabula rasa of the mind is modelled by the sensations we acquire via the senses, which write on the ‘blank slate’, producing our distinguished and unique understanding of the world. The faculty of the imagination is thus revolutionarily seen not as an innate gift of the gods to geniuses, but simply as a faculty each human being possesses. Each and every human being could, from then on, imagine a different world, fostering thus what I consider the major asset of all Romanticisms of the world: romantic individualism. Therefore, I propose to link these two only seemingly different cultural periods of time, the Enlightenment and Romanticism, together, to give their due both to the empiricists and to the romantics, who jointly permitted an evolution of humankind, in ‘authorising’ all human beings in the use of their imagination, just as artists, scientists, and so-thought geniuses had done in the past, i.e. to become ‘artists’ themselves, assuming upon them the accountability towards reality. ‘Enlightened Romanticism’ synthesizes this revolutionary synergy created by the dismissal of innatism and the rise of the imagination.