Download or read book Johnson Rasselas and the Choice of Criticism written by Edward Tomarken and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-07-15 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although Rasselas has received more critical commentary than almost any other work by Samuel Johnson, Edward Tomarken's book is the first full length study to focus on his tale of the Prince of Abyssinia. This anomaly arises, as Tomarken shows, because Rasselas has remained resistant to the customary critical approaches of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, consistently eliciting new kinds of insights and raising new sorts of problems. Tomarken' s contribution is a new methodology to explain this phenomenon. He sees Johnson's early writings, London and Irene, as instances of the writer trying with only partial success to achieve what he first realized in The Vanity of Human Wishes, a means of permitting literary form to refer to conduct. Later works, such as The Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, are viewed as further developments of this method, which achieved its fullest expression in Rasselas and the Life of Pope. Such a reading of Johnson develops an aesthetic that operates on the margins between the literary and the extra-literary. Although Johnson's own critical view was unable to accommodate such a position, Tomarken shows that in practice he moved toward it by a process of trial and error manifest in his poetry and narratives. When raised to the level of critical method, this approach goes beyond the assumptions not only of Johnson's day but also of our own. Tomarken's theoretical coda demonstrates how the choices of current critical theory, like those in the marriage debate in Rasselas, can be understood to interact with one another. Specifically, he proposes a dialectical relationship for two approaches hermeneutics and structuralism-usually seen as opposed to one another. This innovative study will interest not only Johnson scholars but all those concerned with critical theory.
Download or read book Johnson Rasselas and the Choice of Criticism written by Edward Tomarken and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-10-21 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although Rasselas has received more critical commentary than almost any other work by Samuel Johnson, Edward Tomarken's book is the first full length study to focus on his tale of the Prince of Abyssinia. This anomaly arises, as Tomarken shows, because Rasselas has remained resistant to the customary critical approaches of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, consistently eliciting new kinds of insights and raising new sorts of problems. Tomarken' s contribution is a new methodology to explain this phenomenon. He sees Johnson's early writings, London and Irene, as instances of the writer trying with only partial success to achieve what he first realized in The Vanity of Human Wishes, a means of permitting literary form to refer to conduct. Later works, such as The Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, are viewed as further developments of this method, which achieved its fullest expression in Rasselas and the Life of Pope. Such a reading of Johnson develops an aesthetic that operates on the margins between the literary and the extra-literary. Although Johnson's own critical view was unable to accommodate such a position, Tomarken shows that in practice he moved toward it by a process of trial and error manifest in his poetry and narratives. When raised to the level of critical method, this approach goes beyond the assumptions not only of Johnson's day but also of our own. Tomarken's theoretical coda demonstrates how the choices of current critical theory, like those in the marriage debate in Rasselas, can be understood to interact with one another. Specifically, he proposes a dialectical relationship for two approaches hermeneutics and structuralism-usually seen as opposed to one another. This innovative study will interest not only Johnson scholars but all those concerned with critical theory.
Download or read book The History of Rasselas Prince of Abyssinia written by Johnson and published by . This book was released on 1829 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The history of Rasselas prince of Abyssinia written by Samuel Johnson and published by . This book was released on 1846 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Johnson s Milton written by Christine Rees and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-05-06 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Samuel Johnson is often represented as primarily antagonistic or antipathetic to Milton. Yet his imaginative and intellectual engagement with Milton's life and writing extended across the entire span of his own varied writing career. As essayist, poet, lexicographer, critic and biographer - above all as reader - Johnson developed a controversial, fascinating and productive literary relationship with his powerful predecessor. To understand how Johnson creatively appropriates Milton's texts, how he critically challenges yet also confirms Milton's status, and how he constructs him as a biographical subject, is to deepen the modern reader's understanding of both writers in the context of historical continuity and change. Christine Rees's insightful study will be of interest not only to Milton and Johnson specialists, but to all scholars of early modern literary history and biography.
Download or read book Women Write Back written by Stephanie M. Hilger and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women Write Back explores the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women’s responses to texts written by well-known Enlightment figures. Hilger investigates the authorial strategies employed by Karoline von Günderrode, Ellis Cornelia Knight, Julie de Krüdener, and Helen Maria Williams, whose works engage Voltaire’s Mahomet, Johnson’s Rasselas, Goethe’s Werther, and Rousseau’s Julie. The analysis of these women’s texts sheds light on the literary culture of a period that deemed itself not only enlightened but also egalitarian.
Download or read book Landscape Literature and English Religious Culture 1660 1800 written by R. Mayhew and published by Springer. This book was released on 2004-03-15 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Landscape, Literature and English Religious Culture, 1660-1800 offers a powerful revisionist account of the intellectual significance of landscape descriptions during the 'long' Eighteenth-century. Landscape has long been a major arena for debate about the nature of Eighteenth-century English culture; this book surveys those debates and offers a provocative new account. Mayhew shows that describing landscape was a religiously contested practice, and that different theological positions led differing authors to different descriptive approaches. Landscape description, then, shows English intellectual life still in the grips of a Christian and classical mentality in the 'long' Eighteenth-century.
Download or read book Handbook of the British Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century written by Katrin Berndt and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-07-18 with total page 606 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The handbook offers a comprehensive introduction to the British novel in the long eighteenth century, when this genre emerged to develop into the period’s most versatile and popular literary form. Part I features six systematic chapters that discuss literary, intellectual, socio-economic, and political contexts, providing innovative approaches to issues such as sense and sentiment, gender considerations, formal characteristics, economic history, enlightened and radical concepts of citizenship and human rights, ecological ramifications, and Britain’s growing global involvement. Part II presents twenty-five analytical chapters that attend to individual novels, some canonical and others recently recovered. These analyses engage the debates outlined in the systematic chapters, undertaking in-depth readings that both contextualize the works and draw on relevant criticism, literary theory, and cultural perspectives. The handbook’s breadth and depth, clear presentation, and lucid language make it attractive and accessible to scholar and student alike.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson written by Greg Clingham and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1997-10-16 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson, first published in 1997, provides an introduction to the works and intellectual life of one of the most challenging and wide-ranging writers in English literary history. Compiler of the first great English dictionary, editor of Shakespeare, biographer and critic of the English poets, author both of the influential journal Rambler and the popular fiction Rasselas, and one of the most engaging conversationalists in literary culture, Johnson is here illuminatingly discussed from a different point of view. Essays on his main works are complemented by thematic discussion of his views on the experience of women in the eighteenth century, politics, imperialism, religion, and travel as well as by chapters covering his life, conversation, letters, and critical reception. Useful reference features include a chronology and guide to further reading. The keynote to the volume is the seamlessness of Johnson's life and writing, and the extraordinary humane intelligence he brought to all his activities. Accessibly written by a distinguished group of international scholars, this volume supplies a stimulating range of approaches, making Johnson newly relevant for our time.
Download or read book Johnson Writing and Memory written by Greg Clingham and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-09-05 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines Johnson's writing in relation to eighteenth-century thought on literature, history, fiction and law.
Download or read book The Representation of the Ottoman Orient in Eighteenth Century English Literature written by Hasan Baktir and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-01 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspired by the growing interest in oriental countries and cultures, Hasan Baktir examines the representation of the "Ottoman Orient" in 18th century English literature, taking a new perspective to achieve a comprehensive understanding and investigating different aspects of the interaction between the Ottoman Orient and 18th century Europe.A number of questions continue to arise in the wake of Said's 1978 landmark study, "Orientalism". How monodirectional was the flow of power in such representations? To what extent did the travelling observer also participate and become influenced by the phenomena he tried to depict without attachment? What variety of motivations lay behind the desire to know and represent the Oriental other -- was it simply a question of political control? Or were there deeper, more enigmatic factors at play -- sexuality, existential affirmation, even utter idiosyncrasy? How various and diverse was the Western response to the East -- can we discern degrees of sympathy, knowledge, and difference in the various Orients offered to us by the canonical and non-canonical figures of 18th century English letters? Baktir's study provides answers to many aspects of these questions, through a detailed examination of very different texts.Baktir does not completely reject Said's argument that European writers created a separate discourse to represent the Orient; rather, he shows us that there was also a dialogic and negotiating tendency which did not make a radical distinction between the East and the West. Relying his argument on 18th century pseudo-oriental letters, oriental tales, and oriental travelogues, Baktir demonstrates that the representation of the Ottoman Orient in 18th century English literature differs essentially from earlier centuries because a developing critical and liberal spirit established a negotiation between the two worlds. In this book, he indicates how the critical and inquisitive spirit of the age of Enlightenment interanimated Oriental and European cultures.
Download or read book Abyssinia s Samuel Johnson written by Wendy Laura Belcher and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-01 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare written by Edward Tomarken and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the first appearance of Samuel Johnson's edition of Shakespeare's drama in 1765, its Preface has often been published separately, while the Notes have been treated as miscellaneous and fragmentary. As a result, few modern readers realize that the Notes in fact contain coherent interpretations of most of the plays and that many portions of the Preface are generalizations related to those readings. Scholars who have examined the Notes carefully have almost always used them in studies of larger issues, such as Johnson's morality or rhetoric. In this book, Edward Tomarken provides the first full-length study of the Notes to Shakespeare, showing how they raise issues of direct concern to modern critics and theoreticians. While referring to Johnson's notes on all the Shakespearean dramas, Tomarken focuses on eight plays--Henry IV, Troilus and Cressida, Twelfth Night, The Taming of the Shrew, King Lear, The Tempest, Hamlet, and Macbeth--to demonstrate the range of Johnson's editorial and critical abilities. Each chapter, devoted to a single play, moves from the particular to the general-from specific remarks about the play in the Notes, to related theoretical statements in the Preface, and finally to an axiom of literary theory. Ranging from a formulation concerning ideology in criticism to a reconsideration of aesthetic empathy, these axioms are, Tomarken contends, essential to literary criticism as a discipline and manifest Johnson's relevance to modern criticism. The conception of criticism that emerges in this book goes well beyond the theoretical premises of the eighteenth century. Tomarken submits that the ethical dimension of criticism-the moral aspect so fundamental to Johnson but so foreign to modern critics-can point to a way of mediating between the ideological differences that have become so divisive in modern criticism and theory.
Download or read book A Companion to Literature from Milton to Blake written by David Womersley and published by Wiley-Blackwell. This book was released on 2001-04-25 with total page 632 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This definitive Companion provides a critical overview of literary culture in the period from John Milton to William Blake. Its broad chronological range responds to recent reshapings of the canon and identifies new directions of study. The Companion is composed of over fifty contributions from leading scholars in the field, its essays offer students a comprehensive and accessible survey of the field from a wide range of perspectives. It also, however, gives researchers and faculty the opportunity to update their acquaintance with new critical and scholarly work. The volume meets the needs of an intellectual world increasingly given over to inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary study by covering philosophical, political, cultural and historical writing, as well as literary writing. Unlike other similar volumes, the main body of the Companion consists of readings of individual texts, both those commonly and less commonly studied.
Download or read book Regulating Confusion written by Thomas Reinert and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1996-01-17 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the urbanization of eighteenth-century English society, moral philosophers became preoccupied with the difference between individual and crowd behavior. In so doing, they set the stage for a form of political thought divorced from traditional moral reflection. In Regulating Confusion Thomas Reinert places Samuel Johnson in the context of this development and investigates Johnson’s relation to an emerging modernity. Ambivalent about the disruption, confusion, perplexity, and boundless variety apparent in the London of his day, Johnson was committed to the conventions of moral reflection but also troubled by the pressure to adopt the perspective of the crowd and the language of social theory. Regulating Confusion explores the consequences of his ambivalence and his attempt to order the chaos. It discusses his critique of moral generalizations, concept of moral reflection as a symbolic gesture, and account of what happens to the notion of character when individuals, having lost the support of moral convention, become faces in a crowd. Reflecting generally on the relationship between skepticism and political ideology, Reinert also discusses Johnson’s political skepticism and the forms of speculation and action it authorized. Challenging prevalent psychologizing and humanistic interpretations, Regulating Confusion leaves behind the re-emergent view of Johnson as a reactionary ideologue and presents him in a theoretically sophisticated context. It offers his style of skepticism as a model of poise in the face of confusion about the nature of political truth and personal responsibility and demonstrates his value as a resource for students of culture struggling with contemporary debates about the relationship between literature and politics.
Download or read book Genre and Ethics written by Edward Tomarken and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The study addresses the following kinds of questions: Why does genre need ethics? Why does ethics need genre? How is ethics related to and distinguished from ideology as currently used in cultural studies? How does a generic ethical method come to terms with history and historical change? How is a generic ethical method related to religion? Does genre reinforce the concept of the ethical agent? This book will therefore have a broad audience, including scholars whose fields range from the Renaissance to the present, theorists and philosophers whose interests include ethics, cultural studies, and ideologies, and educationists pursuing methods for graduates and undergraduates. The autobiographical introduction serves as the "hook," as our creative writers say, for this audience. Generically, it is experimental, being at once scholarly, pedagogical, and autobiographical."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Johnson Re Visioned written by Philip Smallwood and published by Associated University Presse. This book was released on 2009-04 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How far does Johnson's mind touch the critical consciousness, and how far is the modern experience of his writings a form of historical knowledge? This title includes essays by British and American scholars who seek to answer these questions from a sequence of argued perspectives.
