Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-nr4z6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-02T23:14:58.328Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

27 - The psychology of literary creation and literary response

from LITERATURE AND OTHER DISCIPLINES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
James Sambrook
Edited by
H. B. Nisbet  and
Claude Rawson
H. B. Nisbet
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Claude Rawson
Affiliation:
Yale University, Connecticut
Get access

Summary

The psychology of literary creation is clearly, concisely, and sturdily summarized in Thomas Hobbes's Answer to Davenant's Preface to Gondibert (1650):

Time and Education begets experience; Experience begets memory; Memory begets Judgment and Fancy: Judgment begets the strength and structure, and Fancy begets the ornaments of a Poem … Judgment, the severer Sister, busieth her self in a grave and rigid examination of all the parts of Nature … registring … their order, causes, uses, differences, and resemblances; Whereby the Fancy, when any work of Art is to be performed, findes her materials at hand and prepared for use … So that when she seemeth to fly from one Indies to the other, and from Heaven to Earth, and to penetrate into the hardest matter and obscurest places, into the future and into her self, and all this in a point of time, the voyage is not very great, her self being all she seeks; and her wonderful celerity consisteth not so much in motion as in copious Imagery discreetly ordered and perfectly registered in the memory.

(Spingarn, Critical Essays, II, pp. 59–60)

The images in the memory upon which judgement and fancy work are decaying sense-impressions retained in the mind after the object producing them is removed. Images run naturally into sequences within the mind, according to the contiguity in time and space of those sense-impressions of which they are the decaying residue. Such sequences, ‘the train of imagination’ or ‘train of thought’, may be unguided, as in dreams, or guided by the will, ‘as one would sweep a room, to find a jewel; or as a spaniel ranges the field, till he finds a scent’ (Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 22).

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism , pp. 614 - 632
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1997

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abrams, M. H., The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford, 1953).Google Scholar
Abrams, M. H., ‘From Addison to Kant: modern aesthetics and the exemplary art, in Studies in Eighteenth-Century British Art and Aesthetics, ed. Cohen, Ralph (Berkeley, 1985).Google Scholar
Addison, Joseph, The Spectator, ed. Bond, D. F. (5 vols., Oxford, 1965).Google Scholar
Addison, Joseph, The Letters of Joseph Addison, ed. Graham, Walter (Oxford, 1941).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Addison, Joseph, The Works of the Right Honourable Joseph Addison, ed. Bohn, Henry G. (6 vols., London, 1875).Google Scholar
Addison, Joseph, and Richard, Steele, The Guardian, ed. Stephens, John Calhoun (Kentucky, 1982).Google Scholar
Addison, Joseph, and Richard, Steele, The Spectator, ed. Bond, Donald F. (5 vols., 1965).Google Scholar
Addison, Joseph, and Richard, Steele, The Tatler, ed. Bond, Donald F. (3 vols., Oxford, 1987).Google Scholar
Agnew, Jean-Christophe, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge, 1986).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aldridge, Alfred Owen, ‘Lord Shaftesbury's literary theories’, Philological Quarterly, 24 (1945).Google Scholar
Barrell, Rex A. (ed.), Anthony Ashley Cooper Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713) and ‘Le Refuge Français’ Correspondence, Studies in British History, 15 (Lampeter, 1989).Google Scholar
Brett, R. L., The Third Earl of Shaftesbury: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Literary Theory (London, 1951).Google Scholar
Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Boulton, J. T. (London, 1958).Google Scholar
Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Boulton, James T. (London, 1968).Google Scholar
Cassirer, Ernst, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Koelln, Fritz C. A. and Pettegrove, James P. (Princeton, 1951).Google Scholar
Coleridge, S. T., Biographia Literaria, ed. Engell, J. and Bate, W. J. (2 vols., Princeton, 1983).Google Scholar
Damrosch, Leopold, ‘The significance of Addison's criticism’, Studies in English Literature, 19 (1979).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davidson, James W., ‘Criticism and self-knowledge in Shaftesbury's Soliloquy’, Enlightenment Essays, 5 (1974).Google Scholar
Dennis, John, The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. Hooker, Edward Niles (2 vols., Baltimore, 1939).Google Scholar
Dryden, John, Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays, ed. Watson, George (2 vols., London, 1962).Google Scholar
Du Bos, Jean-Baptiste, Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture (3 vols., 4th edn Paris, 1740).Google Scholar
Duff, William, An Essay on Original Genius, ed. Mahoney, J. L. (Gainesville, 1964).Google Scholar
Eagleton, Terry, The Function of Criticism from the Spectator to Post-Structuralism (London, 1984).Google Scholar
Eagleton, Terry, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford, 1990).Google Scholar
Eisenstein, Elizabeth L., The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe (New York, 1979).Google Scholar
Elioseff, L. A., The Cultural Milieu of Addison's Literary Criticism (Ann Arbor, 1963).Google Scholar
Elioseff, Lee Andrew, The Cultural Milieu of Addison's Literary Criticism (Austin, 1963).Google Scholar
Engell, James, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cambridge MA, 1981).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fielding, Henry, Joseph Andrews and Shamela, ed. Baker, Sheridan (New York, 1972).Google Scholar
Fowler, Thomas, Shaftesbury and Hutcheson (London, 1882).Google Scholar
Fox, Christopher, Locke and the Scriblerians (London, 1988).Google Scholar
Fried, Michael, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley, 1979).Google Scholar
Fry, Paul, The Reach of Criticism: Method and Perception in Literary Theory (New Haven, 1983).Google Scholar
Gay, Peter, ‘The spectator as actor: Addison in perspective’, Encounter, 29 (1967).Google Scholar
Gerard, Alexander, An Essay on Genius, ed. Fabian, B. (Munich, 1966).Google Scholar
Gerard, Alexander, An Essay on Taste, ed. Hipple, W. J. (Gainesville, 1963).Google Scholar
Grean, Stanley, Shaftesbury's Philosophy of Religion and Ethics: A Study in Enthusiasm (Athens OH, 1967).Google Scholar
Habermas, Jürgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Burger, Thomas and Lawrence, Frederick (Cambridge, 1989).Google Scholar
Hall, S. C., Pilgrimages to English Shrines (New York, 1854).Google Scholar
Hansen, David A., ‘Addison on ornament and poetic style’, in Studies in Criticism and Aesthetics, 1660–1800, ed. Anderson, Howard and Shea, John S. (Minneapolis, 1967).Google Scholar
Hartley, David, Observations on Man, his Frame, his Duty, and his Expectations (5th edn, London, 1810).Google Scholar
Hartman, Geoffrey H., Minor Prophecies: The Literary Essay in the Culture Wars (Cambridge, 1991).Google Scholar
Hayman, John G., ‘Shaftesbury and the search for a persona’, Studies in English Literature, 10 (1970).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hipple, Walter John Jr, The Beautiful, the Sublime, and The Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetic Theory (Carbondale IL, 1957).Google Scholar
Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, ed. Tuck, R. (Cambridge, 1991).Google Scholar
Hohendahl, Peter Uwe, The Institution of Criticism (Ithaca, 1982).Google Scholar
Hume, David, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Miller, Eugene F. (Indianapolis, 1985).Google Scholar
James, D. G., The Life of Reason: Hobbes, Locke, Bolingbroke (London, 1949).Google Scholar
Johnson, Samuel, Lives of the English Poets, ed. Hill, George Birkbeck (3 vols., Oxford, 1905).Google Scholar
Kallich, Martin, The Association of Ideas and Critical Theory in Eighteenth-Century England: A History of a Psychological Method in English Criticism (The Hague, 1970).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kallich, Martin, ‘The association of ideas and critical theory: Hobbes, Locke, and Addison’, ELH, 12 (1945).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ketcham, Michael G., Transparent Designs: Reading, Performance, and Form in the Spectator Papers (Athens GA, 1985).Google Scholar
Kinsley, William, ‘Meaning and format: Mr. Spectator and his folio half-sheets’, ELH, 34 (1967).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Klein, Lawrence, ‘The third Earl of Shaftesbury and the progress of politeness’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 18 (1984–85).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leavis, Q. D., Fiction and the Reading Public (Norwood PA, 1977).Google Scholar
Lewis, C. S., Selected Literary Essays, ed. Hooper, Walter (Cambridge, 1969).Google Scholar
Locke, John, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Nidditch, Peter H. (2 vols., Oxford, 1975).Google Scholar
MacLean, Kenneth, John Locke and English Literature of the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, 1936).Google Scholar
Markley, Robert, ‘Sentimentality as performance: Shaftesbury, Sterne, and the theatrics of virtue’, in Nussbaum, Felicity and Brown, Laura (eds.), The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature (New York, 1987).Google Scholar
Markley, Robert, ‘Style and philosophical structure: the contexts of Shaftesbury's Characteristicks’, in Ginsberg, Robert (ed.), The Philosopher as Writer: The Eighteenth Century (London, 1987).Google Scholar
Marsh, Robert, Four Dialectical Theories of Poetry: An Aspect of English Neo-Classical Criticism (Chicago, 1965).Google Scholar
Marshall, David, The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot (New York, 1986).Google Scholar
Marshall, David, The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Rousseau, Diderot, and Mary Shelley (Chicago, 1988).Google Scholar
Marshall, David, ‘Arguing by analogy: Hume's standard of taste’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 28 (1995).Google Scholar
Monk, Samuel H., The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England (Ann Arbor, 1960).Google Scholar
Newton, Isaac, Opticks, ed. Whittaker, E. T. (London, 1931).Google Scholar
Norton, David Fate, Shaftesbury and the Two Scepticisms (Turin, 1968).Google Scholar
Paknadel, Felix, ‘Shaftesbury's illustration of the Characteristics’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 37 (1974).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paulson, Ronald, Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, 1967).Google Scholar
Plumb, J. H., ‘The public, literature, and the arts in the 18th century’, in Fritz, Paul and Williams, David (eds.), The Triumph of Culture: 18th-Century Perspectives (Toronto, 1972).Google Scholar
Price, Martin, To The Palace of Wisdom: Studies in Order and Energy from Dryden to Blake (Carbondale IL, 1970).Google Scholar
Purpus, E. R., ‘The “plain, easy, and familiar way”: the dialogue in English literature, 1660–1725’, ELH, 17 (1950).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reynolds, Joshua Sir, Discourses on Art, ed. Wark, Robert R. (New Haven, 1975).Google Scholar
Rogers, Pat, ‘Shaftesbury and the aesthetics of rhapsody’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 12 (1972).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Oeuvres complètes (4 vols., Paris, 1964).Google Scholar
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Politics and the Arts, Letter to M. d'Alembert on the Theatre, trans. Bloom, Allan (Ithaca, 1973).Google Scholar
Routh, H. V., ‘Steele and Addison’, in The Cambridge History of English Literature, ed. Ward, A. W. and Waller, A. R. (Cambridge, 1932).Google Scholar
Saccamano, Neil, ‘Authority and publication: the works of “Swift”’, The Eighteenth Century, 25 (1984).Google Scholar
Saccamano, Neil, ‘The consolations of ambivalence: Habermas and the public sphere’, MLN, 106 (1991).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Saccamano, Neil, ‘The sublime force of words in Addison's “Pleasures”’, ELH, 57 (1990).Google Scholar
Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (2nd edn, London, 1714).Google Scholar
Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of, Second Characters, ed. Rand, B. (Cambridge, 1914).Google Scholar
Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper third Earl of, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (London, 1711).Google Scholar
Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper third Earl of, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, etc., ed. Robertson, John M. (2 vols., Gloucester MA, 1963).Google Scholar
Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper third Earl of, Letters to a Student at the University (London, 1716).Google Scholar
Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper third Earl of, The Life, Unpublished Letters, and Philosophical Regimen of Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, ed. Rand, Benjamin (London, 1900).Google Scholar
Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper third Earl of, Second Characters or The Language of Forms, ed. Rand, Benjamin (New York, 1969).Google Scholar
Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper third Earl of, Soliloquy: or, Advice to an Author (London, 1710).Google Scholar
Sherman, Carol, ‘In defense of the dialogue: dialogue, Shaftesbury, and Galiani’, Romance Notes, 15 (1973).Google Scholar
Smithers, Peter, The Life of Joseph Addison (Oxford, 1954).Google Scholar
Spingarn, J. E., Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century (3 vols., Oxford, 1908).Google Scholar
Sterne, Laurence, The Life and Times of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. Watt, Ian (Boston, 1965).Google Scholar
Stolnitz, Jerome, ‘“Beauty”: some stages in the history of an idea’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 22 (1961).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stolnitz, Jerome, ‘On the origins of “aesthetic disinterestedness”’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 20 (1961–2).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sweetman, J. E., ‘Shaftesbury's last commission’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 19 (1956).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taylor, Jeremy, A Discourse of the Liberty of Prophesying. Shewing the Unreasonableness of Prescribing to Other Men Faith, and the Inequity of Persecuting Differing Opinions (London, 1648).Google Scholar
Thorpe, C. D., The Aesthetic Theory of Thomas Hobbes (Ann Arbor, 1940).Google Scholar
Thorpe, Clarence D., ‘Addison's contribution to criticism’, in FosterJones, Richard et al. (eds.), The Seventeenth Century: Studies in the History of English Thought and Literature from Bacon to Pope (Stanford, 1951).Google Scholar
Thorpe, Clarence D., ‘Addison's theory of the imagination as “perceptive response”’, Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Art, and Letters, 21 (1936).Google Scholar
Townsend, Dabney, ‘Shaftesbury's aesthetic theory’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 41 (1982).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tuveson, E. L., The Imagination as a Means of Grace: Locke and the Aesthetics of Romanticism (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1960).Google Scholar
Tuveson, Ernest, ‘The importance of Shaftesbury’, ELH, 20 (1953).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Uphaus, Robert W., ‘Shaftesbury on art: the rhapsodic aesthetic’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 27 (1969).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Voitle, Robert, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury, 1671–1713 (Baton Rouge, 1984).Google Scholar
Watson, Melvin R., ‘The Spectator tradition and the development of the familiar essay’, ELH, 13 (1946).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Watt, Ian, ‘The consequences of literacy’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 5 (1963).Google Scholar
Watt, Ian, ‘Publishers and sinners: the Augustan view’, Studies in Bibliography, 12 (1959).Google Scholar
Young, Edward, Conjectures on Original Composition, ed. Morley, E. J. (Manchester, 1918).Google Scholar
Youngren, William H., ‘Addison and the birth of eighteenth-century aesthetics’, Modern Philology, 79 (1982).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×