Amiable Fictions; or, the Pedagogy of Friendship in Enlightenment Media

Abstract

This chapter traces the way authors combine classical and early modern views of true amity with new attitudes about friendship brought on by changes in the forms of public and private communication. I discuss how the essays of Sir Francis Bacon and Michel de Montaigne pre-figure divergent philosophical views that later novelists borrow, synthesize, and transform in the realm of print narrative. In combination, Montaigne and Bacon anticipate the social and epistemological authority granted to friendship ties in the expanding print culture of the eighteenth century. I trace these developments as exhibited in works by Daniel Defoe, Joseph Addison, Elizabeth Rowe, Mary Astell, Lord Chesterfield, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.