Jacob Sider Jost is a professor of English at Dickinson College.

Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s Spectator markets itself to readers as a diurnal regimen of moral and spiritual self-formation: by consuming the paper each day, readers can prepare themselves for the afterlife, which the Spectator argues will be an extrapolation or continuation of life lived on earth, rather than a radically different other world. The paper’s own publication history provides a literary double of this theological argument: first published in ephemeral daily installments, the paper ensures its afterlife through republication in enduring volume form. For the Spectator , both literary and personal immortality are constructed from day to day.

For more information on the published version, visit JSTOR's Website. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23028067#metadata_info_tab_contents

Sider Jost, Jacob. The Afterlife and The Spectator. Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 51, no. 3 (2011): 605-24. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23028067

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