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Claire Boulard, « The Lover ou la passion transitoire », XVII-XVIII. Revue de la Société d'études anglo-américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, ID : 10.3406/xvii.2000.1487
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Résumé
When in 1714 Sir Richard Steele launched The Lover, his new essay periodical, his aim was to redefine the passion of love which, he contended, had been reduced to a the hypocritical "code galant" and had been deprived of its meaning in the Restoration, thus causing great social havoc. He therefore embarked on a scheme where The Lover, headed by its persona Marmaduke Myrtle, and by its club, would teach sensibility and true love to the readers of both sexes. This study explains how Richard Steele created a transitory codification of passion by building a genuine rhetoric of sensibility which he applied to such institutions as marriage. In so doing, he used the very form of his periodical to echo the content. Such techniques turned The Lover into one of the forerunners of the literary movement of sensibility mainly promoted by the novel in the mid- eighteenth century. But this article also aims at discovering the strategies that Steele used to channel the rhetoric of sensibility within the harmless bounds of a social vertue.