Download or read book Samuel Johnson s Attitude to the Arts written by Morris R. Brownell and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1989 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book challenges the traditional view that Johnson knew and cared little about the fine arts. Brownell goes beyond pejorative anecdotes that exaggerate and misrepresent Johnson's attitudes toward music, painting, architecture, and landscape gardening, and presents evidence that Johnson was thoroughly familiar with the arts of his time, contributing to their patronage as something of a Handelian, friend of painters and architects, and a student of landscape more discerning than William Gilpin. Showing that Johnson's repeated expressions of disgust for the arts were part of a Socratic pretense designed to tease and challenge his contemporaries, the book illustrates that he deliberately chose to play the iconoclast at the very moment when the arts were reviving in England, when taste was becoming de rigeur, and the Royal Academy was being founded.
Download or read book Samuel Johnson s Pragmatism and Imagination written by Stefka Ritchie and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2018-11-07 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
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 Domestick Privacies Samuel Johnson and the Art of Biography written by David Wheeler and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 1987 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biography was Samuel Johnson's favorite among literary genres, and his Lives of the Poets is often regarded as the capstone of his career. The central place of biography in his oeuvre is explored in this collection of nine original essays by leading Johnson scholars. Varied in their focus and approach, the essays range from a philosophical overview of Johnson's notion of the relation between life and art, to a detailed reading of the Life of Milton, to a speculation on the value of the Lives in the classroom. Emerging clearly in the essays are the dual concerns -- artistic and intellectual.
Download or read book Samuel Johnson in Historical Context written by J. Clark and published by Springer. This book was released on 2001-12-13 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In one of the more sudden shifts of perspective, and hotly contested controversies of recent historical and literary scholarship, our view of Johnson has been fundamentally changed. This volume offers the best up-to-the-moment account of what has been achieved, and points to the new directions in which scholarship is developing. It will be essential reading for all concerned with eighteenth-century studies.
Download or read book Samuel Johnson and the Art of Sinking 1709 1791 written by Freya Johnston and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2005-02-17 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The traditional view of Samuel Johnson as hostile to particulars, trifles, and aesthetic mediocrity only half-explains his authorial character. Samuel Johnson and the Art of Sinking 1709-1791 argues that, in a period dominated by social and literary hierarchies, Johnson's works reveal a defining interest in 'little', 'mean', or 'low' topics and people. Freya Johnston moves away from a critical emphasis on what literature of this period excludes, to consider its modes of including recalcitrant material. Of necessity finite, any piece of writing is informed by the subject matter it omits or to which it indirectly alludes. How can we identify the peripheral topics or characters purportedly 'excluded' from a text, unless it provides compelling inferences that oblige us to supply the omission? In which case, something subtler is at work than barefaced proscription. Rehearsing the comparative merits of great and little things, Johnson and his contemporaries tested the opposing claims of pagan and Christian authority. Ancient criticism, and its eighteenth-century adherents, held that each subject required an appropriate style: little matters call for the low, lofty ones for the high. Yet Gospel writers stressed Christ's incarnation as a praiseworthy and imitable descent to the humanly little — one that is compatible with the most sublime style. Through a series of close readings, this book examines how Johnson conceived of his relationships to and with the margins of writing and of society. It proposes that his literary and critical practice is neither inclusive nor exclusive in its attitudes towards peripheral things.
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 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 Samuel Johnson and the Life of Reading written by Robert DeMaria Jr. and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 1997-04-21 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Samuel Johnson and the Life of Reading, Robert DeMaria considers the surprising influence of one of the greatest readers in English literature. Johnson's relationship to books not only reveals much about his life and times, DeMaria contends, but also provides a dramatic counterpoint to modern reading habits. As a superior practitioner of the craft, Johnson provides a compelling model for how to read—indeed, he provides different models for different kinds of reading. DeMaria shows how Johnson recognized early that not all reading was alike—some requiring intense concentration, some suited for cursory glances, some requiring silence, some best appreciated amid the chatter of a coffeehouse. Considering the remarkable range of Johnson's reading, DeMaria discovers in one extraordinary career a synoptic view of the subject. "Enacts Johnson's celebrated variation on a theme from Horace—it does not merely delight and instruct, but rather instructs by delighting us . . . DeMaria proves himself a reader altogether worthy of his subject."—Times Literary Supplement "Fascinatingly perceptive both of Johnson's own reading habits and of their significance in the cultural history of reading."—Modern Language Review "Both a scholarly and an imaginative achievement, combining detailed detective work, abstract categorization, and sympathetic understanding. The finished product re-creates the detailed fabric of Johnson's reading career while locating it in a cultural landscape of rapid publication and growing literacy . . . Eminently readable, learned, and thoughtful."—Modern Philology "An intellectual history of the writer and his age."—Magill's Literary Annual "DeMaria presents an imaginative re-creation of Johnson's library and suggests how his reading habits offered a model for preventing the disappearance of the reader."—Biblio
Download or read book The Letters of Samuel Johnson Volume IV written by Samuel Johnson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-14 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With these two volumes Princeton University Press concludes the first scholarly edition of the letters of Samuel Johnson to appear in forty years. Volume IV chronicles the last three years of Johnson's life, an epistolary endgame that includes the breakup of the friendship with Hester Thrale and a poignant reaching out to new friends and new experiences. Volume V includes not only the comprehensive index but those undated letters that cannot confidently be assigned to a specific year, "ghost" letters (those whose existence is documented in other sources), three letters that have recently been recovered, and translations of Johnson's letters in Latin. Originally published in 1994. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Download or read book A Companion to Eighteenth Century Poetry written by Christine Gerrard and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-02-10 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A COMPANION TO & EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETRY A COMPANION TO & EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETRY Edited by Christine Gerrard This wide-ranging Companion reflects the dramatic transformation that has taken place in the study of eighteenth-century poetry over the past two decades. New essays by leading scholars in the field address an expanded poetic canon that now incorporates verse by many women poets and other formerly marginalized poetic voices. The volume engages with topical critical debates such as the production and consumption of literary texts, the constructions of femininity, sentiment and sensibility, enthusiasm, politics and aesthetics, and the growth of imperialism. The Companion opens with a section on contexts, considering eighteenth-century poetry’s relationships with such topics as party politics, religion, science, the visual arts, and the literary marketplace. A series of close readings of specific poems follows, ranging from familiar texts such as Pope’s The Rape of the Lock to slightly less well-known works such as Swift’s “Stella” poems and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Town Eclogues. Essays on forms and genres, and a series of more provocative contributions on significant themes and debates, complete the volume. The Companion gives readers a thorough grounding in both the background and the substance of eighteenth-century poetry, and is designed to be used alongside David Fairer and Christine Gerrard’s Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (3rd edition, 2014).
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 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 Making the English Canon written by Jonathan Brody Kramnick and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jonathan Brody Kramnick's book examines the formation of the English canon over the first two-thirds of the eighteenth century. Kramnick details how the idea of literary tradition emerged out of a prolonged engagement with the institutions of cultural modernity, from the public sphere and national identity to capitalism and the print market. Looking at a wide variety of eighteenth-century critical writing, he analyses the tensions that inhabited the categories of national literature and public culture at the moment of their emergence.
Download or read book Representation Heterodoxy and Aesthetics written by Ashley Marshall and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2014-12-23 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The chapters constituting this book are different in subject and method, striking testimony to the range of Paulson’s interests and the versatility of his critical powers. In his prolific career he has produced extensive analysis of art, poetry, fiction, and aesthetics produced in England between 1650 and 1830. Paulson’s unique contribution has to do with his understanding of “seeing” and “reading” as closely related enterprises, and “popular” forms in art and literature as intimately connected—connections illustrated by literary critics and art historians here. Every essay shares some of the concerns and methods that characterize Paulson’s wonderfully idiosyncratic thought—except for the final essay, an attempt systematically to analyze Paulson’s critical principles and methods. Recurrent themes are a concern with satire in the eighteenth century; a connection between verbal and visual reading; an insistence on the importance of individual artistic choices to the history of culture; an attention to the aims and motives of individual makers of art; and a sensitivity to the crucial links between high and low art. This volume offers rich explorations of a range of subjects: Swift’s relationship to Congreve; Zoffany’s condemnation of Gillray and Hogarth, and broader implications for the role of art in public discourse; the presentation of mourning in the work of the Welsh artist and writer Edward Pugh; G. M. Woodward’s “Coffee-House Characters,” representing a turn from satire on morals towards satire on manners; Adam Smith’s evolving aesthetic program; Samuel Richardson’s notions of social reading. The discussions represent a variety of exemplifications of the Paulsonesque, showing a concern with satiric representation in mixed media, with different forms of heterodoxy and iconoclasm, and with the values of producers of popular and polite culture in this period.
Download or read book Improper Pursuits written by Carola Hicks and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2014-08-19 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With these words to Boswell, Samuel Johnson dismissed Lady Di Beauclerk, the wife of one of his closest friends, a woman of the highest rank, the daughter of a duke, who had forsaken her reputation, her place in society, her children, and her role as lady-in-waiting to the Queen for love. Born Lady Diana Spencer in 1735, the eldest child of the third Duke of Marlborough, she was expected rigidly to follow a traditional path through life: educated in the fashion considered suitable for a girl, and married to a man of the appropriate rank for a duke's daughter. But finding herself in a desperately unhappy marriage to Viscount Bolingbroke, Lady Di overturned convention. She left her husband, maintained a secret relationship with her lover, Topham Beauclerk, hid the birth of an illegitimate child, and eventually helped to support herself by painting. Lady Di Beauclerk was a highly gifted artist who was able to use her scandalous reputation as an adulteress, aristocratic woman to further her career as a painter and designer. She painted portraits, illustrated plays and books, provided designs for Wedgwood's innovative pottery, and decorated rooms with murals. Championed by her close friend Horace Walpole, whose letters illuminate all aspects of her life, she was able to establish herself as an admired artist at a time when women struggled to forge careers. Carola Hicks provides an enthralling account of eighteenth-century society, in which Lady Di encountered many of the most eminent artistic, literary, and political figures of the day. Improper Pursuits is an absorbing study of a singular life.
Download or read book Samuel Johnson written by Samuel Johnson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-09-30 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
