The figural logic that underpins the clothing tropes is metonymic in the first instance breeches are associated with civilization and with masculinity. Addison's solution is to restabilize, by rhetorical means, the constitutive oppositions that Montaigne's breeches jest undoes. Breeches therefore are not just the sign of civilized decorum, they are its very substance. Indeed, the naked body must, according to the categorical limits established here, be barbaric. Montaigne implies that if civilization is reducible to its signs, then the civilized, decorous body that breeches signify is civilized precisely because the breeches displace- replace as well as conceal-it, and what breeches conceal may equally be the body of a barbarian. Spectator relates the visit to London of "four Indian kings." Addison adapts Montaigne's playful allegory of barbarism and civilization in service of his own project of constructing a discursive model of civic society, ultimately consigning Montaigne himself to the category of the barbaric in order to re-establish the distinction, which the "lively old Gascon" has mischievously undermined with the jest about breeches that concludes his essay. This essay proceeds from the suggestion that Joseph Addison alludes to Michel de Montaigne's "Des Cannibales" in Spectator 50, when Mr. KEYWORDS Addison, Joseph Steele, Richard virtuoso antiquarianism connoisseur aesthetics But the essays are best understood as part of an important moment of transition in which an early enlightenment notion of taste emerged from a template established by baroque virtuosity rather than as a complete rejection of virtuoso culture. In their writings on art and connoisseurship in the Tatler and Spectator essays, both Addison and Steele can be understood as defenders of a neoclassical aesthetic that rejected and ridiculed a supposedly indiscriminate virtuoso aesthetic of curiosity. It is observed that Addison in particular wrote a virtuoso travel narrative in his Remarks on Italy as well as contributing to the discourse on antiquarian medal-collecting. It argues that both Addison and Steele did not reject virtuoso culture so much as to attempt to reform and redefine it. This paper examines the relationship between the aesthetic thought of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele and early modern virtuoso culture. Through textual and historical analysis, with special focus on the public discussions generated by the texts, this article serves as a case study of multiple adaptations and how they were influenced by underlying anxieties about pronatalism and heredity in early postwar culture. It contrasts March's insistence on realism and naturalism, exemplified by his incorporation of real-life stories within the fictional work, with Anderson's and Warner Brothers’ de-naturalizing alterations. This article studies the text and reception of The Bad Seed as it is transferred and transformed through these media (that of the naturalist novel, Broadway play, and controversial Hollywood movie) with a critical focus on stylistic naturalism, sex, and reproduction. The same year, Maxwell Anderson's play version hit Broadway to high acclaim, and, in 1956, Warner Brothers released a popular film adaptation. In April 1954, William March's The Bad Seed, a novel about a dysgenic child murderer named Rhoda, was published and became an instant bestseller.
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