SOURCE: “The Politics of Taste in the Spectator,” in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Vol. 35, No. 1, Spring 1994, pp. 46-63.
In the essay that follows, Dykstal offers a Marxist analysis of the Spectator's role in defining “taste” as an “organizing principle of the public sphere,” in which private rectitude is publicly recognized. In this formulation, the critic contends, taste “rests, ultimately, not on the private apprehension of beauty but on the public defense of it.”
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