Author: Greg Clingham Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 9780521556255 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 290
Book Description
This Companion, first published in 1997, provides an introduction to the works and life of one of the key figures in English literary history.
Author: A. D. Cousins Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1000990311 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 176
Book Description
This book is the first to assess Johnson’s diverse insights into friendship—that is to say, his profound as well as widely ranging appreciation of it—over the course of his long literary career. It examines his engagements with ancient philosophies of friendship and with subsequent reformulations of or departures from that diverse inheritance. The volume explores and illuminates Johnson’s understanding of friendship in the private and public spheres—in particular, friendship’s therapeutic amelioration of personal experience and transformative impact upon civil life. Doing so, it considers both his portrayals of interaction with his friends and his more overtly fictional representations of friendship across the many genres in which he wrote. It presents at once an original re-assessment of Johnson’s writings and new interpretations of friendship as an element of civility in mid-eighteenth-century British culture.
Author: Phil Jones Publisher: Liverpool University Press ISBN: 1638040788 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 320
Book Description
This book examines how Samuel Johnson was assimilated by later writers, ranging from James Boswell to Samuel Beckett. It is as much about these writers as Johnson himself, showing how they found their own space, in part, through their response to Johnson, which helped shape their writing and view of contemporary literature.
Author: Helen Deutsch Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226143856 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 337
Book Description
The autopsy of Samuel Johnson (1709-84) initiated two centuries of Johnsonian anatomy-both in medical speculation about his famously unruly body and in literary devotion to his anecdotal remains. Even today, Johnson is an enduring symbol of individuality, authority, masculinity, and Englishness, ultimately lending a style and a name—the Age of Johnson—to the eighteenth-century English literary canon. Loving Dr. Johnson uses the enormous popularity of Johnson to understand a singular case of author love and to reflect upon what the love of authors has to do with the love of literature. Helen Deutsch's work is driven by several impulses, among them her affection for both Johnson's work and Boswell's biography of him, and her own distance from the largely male tradition of Johnsonian criticism—a tradition to which she remains indebted and to which Loving Dr. Johnson is ultimately an homage. Limning sharply Johnson's capacious oeuvre, Deutsch's study is also the first of its kind to examine the practices and rituals of Johnsonian societies around the world, wherein Johnson's literary work is now dwarfed by the figure of the writer himself. An absorbing look at one iconic author and his afterlives, Loving Dr. Johnson will be of enormous value to students of English literature and literary scholars keenly interested in canon formation.
Author: Wendy Laura Belcher Publisher: OUP USA ISBN: 0199793212 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 298
Book Description
Uncovers African influences on the Western imagination during the eighteenth century, paying particular attention to the ways Ethiopia inspired and shaped the work of Samuel Johnson.
Author: Samuel Johnson Publisher: Yale University Press ISBN: 030011303X Category : Literary Collections Languages : en Pages : 853
Book Description
A one-volume collection of the prose and poetry of eighteenth-century Britain&#ldquo;s pre-eminent lexicographer, critic, biographer, and poet Samuel Johnson Samuel Johnson was eighteenth-century Britain's preeminent man of letters, and his influence endures to this day. He excelled as a moral and literary critic, biographer, lexicographer, and poet. This anthology, designed to make Johnson's essential works accessible to students and general readers, draws its texts from the definitive Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. In most cases, texts are included in full rather than excerpted. The anthology includes many essays from The Rambler and other periodicals; Rasselas; the prefaces to Johnson's Dictionary and his edition of Shakespeare; the complete Lives of Cowley, Milton, Pope, Savage, and Gray, as well as generous selections from A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. Some parts are arranged thematically, allowing readers to focus on such topics as religion, marriage, war, and literature. The anthology includes a biographical introduction, and its ample annotation updates and enlarges the commentary in the YaleEdition.
Author: Norma Clarke Publisher: Random House ISBN: 1446475719 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 318
Book Description
Dr Johnson's friendships with the leading women writers of the day was an important feature of his life and theirs. He was willing to treat women as intellectual equals and to promote their careers: something ignored by his main biographer, James Boswell. Dr Johnson's Women investigates the lives and writings of six leading female authors Johnson knew well: Elizabeth Carter, Charlotte Lennox, Elizabeth Montagu, Hester Thrale, Hannah More and Fanny Burney. It explores their relationships with Johnson, with each other and with the world of letters. It shows what it was like to be a woman writer in the 'Age of Johnson'. It is often assumed that women writers in the eighteenth century suffered the same restrictions and obstacles that confronted their Victorian successors. Norma Clarke shows that this was by no means the case. Highlighting the opportunities available to women of talent in the eighteenth century, Dr Johnson's Women makes clear just how impressive and varied their achievements were.
Author: Lawrence Lipking Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 9780674040281 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 396
Book Description
He was a servant to the public, a writer for hire. He was a hero, an author adding to the glory of his nation. But can a writer be both hack and hero? The career of Samuel Johnson, recounted here by Lawrence Lipking, proves that the two can be one. And it further proves, in its enduring interest for readers, that academic fashions today may be a bit hasty in pronouncing the "death of the author." A book about the life of an author, about how an author is made, not born, Lipking's Samuel Johnson is the story of the man as he lived--and lives--in his work. Tracing Johnson's rocky climb from anonymity to fame, in the course of which he came to stand for both the greatness of English literature and the good sense of the common reader, the book shows how this life transformed the very nature of authorship. Beginning with the defiant letter to Chesterfield that made Johnson a celebrity, Samuel Johnson offers fresh readings of all the writer's major works, viewed through the lens of two ongoing preoccupations: the urge to do great deeds--and the sense that bold expectations are doomed to disappointment. Johnson steers between the twin perils of ambition and despondency. Mounting a challenge to the emerging industry that glorified and capitalized on Shakespeare, he stresses instead the playwright's power to cure the illusions of everyday life. All Johnson's works reveal his extraordinary sympathy with ordinary people. In his groundbreaking Dictionary, in his poems and essays, and in The Lives of the English Poets, we see Johnson becoming the key figure in the culture of literacy that reaches from his day to our own.
Author: Stefka Ritchie Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 1527521095 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 361
Book Description
The central theme of this book is an under-studied link between the canon of Francis Bacon’s and Isaac Newton’s scientific and philosophical thought and Samuel Johnson’s critical approach that can be traced in a textual study of his literary works. The interpretive framework adopted here encourages familiarity with the history and philosophy of science, confirming that the history of ideas is an entirely human construct that constitutes an integral part of intellectual history. This further endorses the argument that intermediality can only be of benefit to future research into the richness of Johnson’s literary style. As perceived boundaries are crossed between conventionally distinct communication media, the profile of Johnson that emerges is of a writer of passionate intelligence who was able to combine a pragmatic approach to knowledge with flights of imagination as a true artist.
Author: Greg Clingham
Author: A. D. Cousins
Author: Phil Jones
Author: Helen Deutsch
Author: James James Lowry Clifford
Author: Wendy Laura Belcher
Author: Samuel Johnson
Author: Norma Clarke
Author: Lawrence Lipking
Author: Stefka Ritchie