Download or read book Samuel Johnson After Deconstruction written by Steven Lynn and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "My other works are wine and water," said Samuel Johnson to Samuel Rogers, "but my Rambler is pure wine." Some critics have disagreed, labeling the essays uneven and dismissing the bulk of them as hastily concocted hackwork by a writer taking a break from or earning money for a more important project--the Dictionary of the English Language. Yet, Steven Lynn, in the first book-length study of The Rambler, resoundingly contradicts such critics; combining deconstruction and other current methods with eighteenth-century rhetorical theories, Lynn refutes conventional critical wisdom among Johnsonians, asserting that the 208 Rambler essays form a coherent whole. Lynn argues that a controlling tenet in the series is that "we are each and every one ramblers, wandering and searching for some stable meaning and satisfaction, which will inevitably elude us in this world. By confronting this absence, Johnson (like a deconstructive theologian) leads us repeatedly to acknowledge the necessity of faith." For Lynn, furthermore, the unifying thread running through the series is expressed in the prayer Johnson composed as he embarked on the journey of The Rambler: "Almighty God, . . . without whose grace all wisdom is folly, grant, I beseech Thee, that in this my undertaking thy Holy Spirit may not be witheld from me, but that I may promote thy glory, and the Salvation both of myself and others." As Lynn shows, though Johnson anticipates deconstruction, his controlling evangelistic aim differs profoundly and instructively from it.
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.
Download or read book Samuel Johnson After 300 Years written by Greg Clingham and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-05-28 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To mark the tercentenary of Samuel Johnson's birth in 2009, the specially-commissioned essays contained here review his scholarly reputation. An international team of experts reflects authoritatively on the various dimensions of literary, historical, critical and ethical life touched by Johnson's extraordinary achievement. The volume distinctively casts its net widely and combines consistently innovative thinking on Johnson's historical role with a fresh sense of present criticism. Chapters cover subjects as diverse as Johnson's moral philosophy, his legal thought, his influence on Jane Austen, and the question of the Johnson canon. The contributors examine the larger theoretical and scholarly contexts in which it is now possible to situate his work, and from which it may often be necessary to differentiate it. All the contributors have a distinguished record of scholarship in eighteenth-century studies, Johnson scholarship, and cultural history and theory.
Download or read book Print Chaos and Complexity written by Mark E. Wildermuth and published by Associated University Presse. This book was released on 2008 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text describes how 18th-century awareness of the interplay between fixity and instability in printed texts demonstrates the role print played in developing Samuel Johnson's awareness of print culture's impact on human beings ethically, politically, and aesthetically.
Download or read book Samuel Johnson written by Lawrence Lipking and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
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: This Companion, first published in 1997, provides an introduction to the works and life of one of the key figures in English literary history.
Download or read book Samuel Johnson in Context written by John T. Lynch and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A work of reference on 'the age of Johnson', putting literature in the context of the society that produced it.
Download or read book Samuel Johnson and the Making of Modern England written by Nicholas Hudson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-10-30 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Samuel Johnson, one of the most renowned authors of the eighteenth century, became virtually a symbol of English national identity in the century following his death in 1784. In Samuel Johnson and the Making of Modern England Nicholas Hudson argues that Johnson not only came to personify English cultural identity but did much to shape it. Hudson examines his contribution to the creation of the modern English identity, approaching Johnson's writing and conversation from scarcely explored directions of cultural criticism - class politics, feminism, party politics, the public sphere, nationalism, and imperialism. Hudson charts the career of an author who rose from obscurity to fame during precisely the period that England became the dominant ideological force in the Western world. In exploring the relations between Johnson's career and the development of England's modern national identity, Hudson develops new and provocative arguments concerning both Johnson's literary achievement and the nature of English Nationhood.
Download or read book Samuel Johnson Among the Modernists written by Anthony W. Lee and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-09 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The traditional view of Samuel Johnson has been that of a reactionary conservative. Although many have worked to undermine this stereotype, perhaps enough remains to claim Johnson as a representative of modernity. This book aims to demonstrate that Johnson is a figure of modernity, one with an appeal many modernist writers found irresistible.
Download or read book New Essays on Samuel Johnson written by Anthony W. Lee and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-10-17 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New Essays on Samuel Johnson: Revaluation is a collection of essays by various hands that examines its point of focus, the inexhaustible English author Samuel Johnson, from a variety of different critical perspectives. The book also simultaneously interrogates particular texts (such as the Dictionary, the Lives of the Poets) alongside general themes (such as Johnson and intertextuality, Johnson and autobiography). The word “revaluation” from the title connotes both the deployment of specifically au courant approaches—viewing, for example, Johnson in relation to climate change, or Johnson and the notion of “osmology”—as well as more general reflections upon Johnson’s importance to our present cultural and temporal moment.
Download or read book The Literary Criticism of Samuel Johnson written by Philip Smallwood and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-31 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compelling case for the importance of the heart and emotions over that of critical theory in Johnson's literary criticism.
Download or read book The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson written by Greg Clingham and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-09-29 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Students, scholars, and general readers alike will find the New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson deeply informed and appealingly written. Each newly commissioned chapter explores aspects of Johnson's writing and thought, including his ethical grasp of life, his views of language, the roots of his ideas in Renaissance humanism, and his skeptical-humane style. Among the themes engaged are history, disability, gender, politics, race, slavery, Johnson's representation in art, and the significance of the Yale Edition. Works discussed include Johnson's poetry and fiction, his moral essays and political tracts, his Shakespeare edition and Dictionary, and his critical, biographical, and travel writing. A narrated Further Reading provides an informative guide to the study of Johnson, and a substantial Introduction highlights how his literary practice, philosophical values, and life experience provide a challenge to readers new and established. Through fresh, integrated insights, this authoritative guide reveals the surprising contemporaneity of Johnson's thought.
Download or read book The Reformist Ideas of Samuel Johnson written by Stefka Ritchie and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2017-03-07 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores what remains an under-studied aspect of Samuel Johnson’s profile as a person and writer – namely, his attitude to social improvement. The interpretive framework provided here is cross-disciplinary, and applies perspectives from social and cultural history, legal history, architectural history and, of course, English literature. This allows Johnson’s writings to be read against the peculiarities of their historical milieu, and reveals Johnson in a new light – as an advocate of social improvement for human betterment. Considering the multiplicity of narrative modes that have been employed, the book points to the blurred boundaries and overlapping between history, testimony and fiction, and argues that a future biography of Samuel Johnson has to recognise that throughout his life he valued the utilitarian aspect of his manifesto as a writer to impart a more charitable attitude in the pursuit of a more caring society.
Download or read book The Works of Samuel Johnson written by Samuel Johnson and published by . This book was released on 1903 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Encyclopedia of the Essay written by Tracy Chevalier and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-10-12 with total page 1032 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking new source of international scope defines the essay as nonfictional prose texts of between one and 50 pages in length. The more than 500 entries by 275 contributors include entries on nationalities, various categories of essays such as generic (such as sermons, aphorisms), individual major works, notable writers, and periodicals that created a market for essays, and particularly famous or significant essays. The preface details the historical development of the essay, and the alphabetically arranged entries usually include biographical sketch, nationality, era, selected writings list, additional readings, and anthologies
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 After the Death of Literature written by Richard B. Schwartz and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Schwartz speculates that Johnson - who revered hard facts, a wide cultural base, and common sense - would have exhibited scant patience with the heavily academic approaches currently favored in the study of literature. He considers it probable that the combatants in the early struggles of the culture wars are losing energy and that, in the wake of Alvin Kernan's declaration of the death of literature, new battlegrounds are developing. Ironically admiring the orchestration and staging of battles old and new - "superb" he calls them - he characterizes the entire culture war as a "battle between straw men, carefully constructed by the combatants to sustain a pattern of polarization that could be exploited to provide continuing professional advancement."
