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Author: Seth Rudy Publisher: Springer ISBN: 1137411546 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 145
Book Description
Literature and Encyclopedism in Enlightenment Britain tells the story of long-term aspirations to comprehend, record, and disseminate complete knowledge of the world. It draws on a wide range of literary and non-literary works from the early modern era and British Enlightenment.
Author: Samuel Johnson Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674054075 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 532
Book Description
Thanks to Boswell’s monumental biography of Samuel Johnson, we remember Dr. Johnson today as a great wit and conversationalist, the rationalist epitome and the sage of the Enlightenment. He is more often quoted than read, his name invoked in party conversation on such diverse topics as marriage, sleep, deceit, mental concentration, and patriotism, to generally humorous effect. But in Johnson’s own day, he was best known as an essayist, critic, and lexicographer: a gifted writer possessed of great force of mind and wisdom. Writing a century after Johnson, Ruskin wrote of Johnson’s essays: He “taught me to measure life, and distrust fortune...he saved me forever from false thoughts and futile speculations.” Peter Martin here presents “the heart of Johnson,” a selection of some of Johnson’s best moral and critical essays. At the center of this collection are the periodical essays from the Rambler, Adventurer, and Idler. Also included are Johnson’s great moral fable, Rasselas; the Prefaces to the Dictionary and his edition of Shakespeare; and selections from Lives of the Poets. Together, these works—allied in their literary, social, and moral concerns—are the ones that continue to speak urgently to readers today.
Author: L.E. Semler Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1351871064 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 405
Book Description
The essays in Word and Self Estranged in English Texts, 1550-1660, consider diverse historical contexts for writing about 'strangeness'. They draw on current practices of reading to present contrasts and analogies within and between various social understandings. In so doing they reveal an interplay of thematic and stylistic modes that tells us a great deal about how, and why, certain aspects of life and thinking were 'estranged' in sixteenth and seventeenth century thinking. The collection's unique strength is that it makes specific bridges between contemporary perspectives and early modern connotations of strangeness and inhibition. The subjects of these essays are 'strange' to our ways of thinking because of their obvious distance from us in time and culture. And yet, curiously, far from being entirely alien to these texts, some of the most modern thinking-about paradigms, texts, concepts-connects with the early modern in unexpected ways. Milton meets the contemporary 'competent reader', Wittgenstein meets Robert Cawdrey, Shakespeare embraces the teenager, and Marvell matches wits with French mathematician René Thom. Additionally, the early modern texts posit their own 'others', or sites of estrangement-Moorishness, Persian art, even the human body-with which they perform their own astonishing maneuvers of estrangement and alignment. In reading Renaissance works from our own time and inviting them to reflect upon our own time, Word and Self Estranged in English Texts, 1550-1660 offers a vital reinterpretation of early modern texts.
Author: Howard D. Weinbrot Publisher: University of Delaware Press ISBN: 9780874138740 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 436
Book Description
Howard D. Weinbrot's Aspects of Samuel Johnson: Essays on His Arts, Mind, Afterlife, and Politics collects earlier and new essays on Johnson's varied achievements in lexicography, poetry, narrative, and prose style. It considers Johnson's uses of the general and the particular as they relate to the reader's role in the creative process, his complex approach to the concept of literary genre, and his resolutely in-human view of skepticism.
Author: Antoinina Bevan Zlatar Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company ISBN: 9027258449 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 270
Book Description
The essays collected in this volume engage in a conversation among lexicography, the culture of the book, and the canonization and commemoration of English literary figures and their works in the long eighteenth century. The source of inspiration for each piece is Allen Reddick’s scholarship on Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), the great English lexicographer whose Dictionary (1755) included thousands upon thousands of illustrative quotations from the “best” authors, and, more recently, on Thomas Hollis (1720-1774), the much less well-known bibliophile who sent gifts of books by a pantheon of Whig authors to individuals and libraries in Britain, Protestant bastions in continental Europe, and America. Between the covers of Words, Books, Images readers will encounter canonical English authors of prose and poetry—Bacon, Milton, Defoe, Dryden, Pope, Richardson, Swift, Byron, Mary Shelley, and Edward Lear. But they will also become acquainted with the agents of their canonization and commemoration—the printers and publishers of Grub Street, the biographer John Aubrey, the lexicographer and biographer Johnson, the bibliophile Hollis, and the portrait painter Reynolds. No less crucially, they will meet fellow readers of then and now—women and men who peruse, poach, snip, and savour a book’s every word and image.
Author: Freya Johnston Publisher: OUP Oxford ISBN: 0191637033 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 241
Book Description
Samuel Johnson: The Arc of the Pendulum offers unique insight into the works of Samuel Johnson by re-considering William Hazlitt's oft-cited comparison between Johnson's prose and a pendulum. In 1819, William Hazlitt condemned Samuel Johnson's prose style as 'a species of rhyming' in which 'the close of the period follows as mechanically as the oscillation of a pendulum, the sense is balanced with the sound'. Predictable, formulaic, and unresponsive, Hazlitt's Johnson was 'incapable of latitude and compromise, a mere automaton who rebounded from one position to its opposite extreme'. This collection of essays focuses on Johnson's works, rather than perceptions of his personality, and argues that Johnson's perceived erratic opinions reflect an understanding of the complexity, instability, and contradictions of the world in which he lived. The volume challenges Hazlitt's influential reading of the Johnsonian pendulum, focusing on the uses and enjoyments of inconsistency, and the varieties of instability, irresolution, and active change which are revealed by and within Johnson. Chapters from a strong team of contributors present new perspectives on Johnson's work, life, and reception. The chapters address questions of style, authority, language, lexicography, and biography across a range of Johnson's writings from the early poetry to the late prose. Johnson emerges from these chapters not as a writer trapped within a set of oppositions, but as one who engages imaginatively and vigorously with flux, dynamism, and inconclusiveness. From the late eighteenth century onwards, to be 'Johnsonian' has typically been made synonymous with firm resolution and trenchant opinion, with polysyllabic excess and a style removed from the exigencies and accidents of ordinary existence. And yet, as this volume suggests, Johnson's life and writings embody the critical and creative play of ideas, a form of interaction with the world which is shaped by instability, contradiction, and combat.
Author: Lynda Mugglestone Publisher: OUP Oxford ISBN: 0191669504 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 303
Book Description
Popular readings of Johnson as a dictionary-maker often see him as a writer who both laments and attempts to control the state of the language. Lynda Mugglestone looks at the range of Johnson's writings on, and the complexity of his thinking about, language and lexicography. She shows how these reveal him probing problems not just of meaning and use but what he considered the related issues of control, obedience, and justice, as well as the difficulties of power when exerted over the 'sea of words'. She examines his attitudes to language change, loan words, spelling, history, and authority, describing, too, the evolution of his ideas about the nature, purpose, and methods of lexicography, and shows how these reflect his own wider thinking about politics, culture, and society. The book offers a careful reassessment of Johnson's lexicographical practice, examining in detail his commitment to evidence, and the uses to which this might be put. Dictionary-making, for Johnson, came to be seen as a long and difficult voyage round the world of the English language. While such images play their own role in lexicographical tradition, Johnson would, as this volume explores, also make them very much his own in a range of distinctive, and illuminating, ways. Johnson's metaphors invite us to consider-and reconsider-the processes by which a dictionary might be made and the kind of destination it might seek, as well as the state of language that might be reached by such endeavours. For Johnson, where the dictionary-maker might go, and what should be accomplished along the way, can often seem to raise pertinent and perhaps troubling questions. Lynda Mugglestone's generous, wide-ranging account casts new light on Johnson's life in language and provides an engaging reassessment of his impact on English culture, the making of dictionaries, and their role in a nation's identity.
Author: John T. Lynch
Author: John T. Lynch
Author: Seth Rudy
Author: Samuel Johnson
Author: L.E. Semler
Author: Alexander Bergs
Author: Howard D. Weinbrot
Author: Antoinina Bevan Zlatar
Author: John T. Lynch
Author: Freya Johnston
Author: Lynda Mugglestone