Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Johnson written by Jack Lynch and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-09-22 with total page 705 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No major author worked in more genres than Samuel Johnson--essays, poetry, fiction, criticism, biography, scholarly editing, lexicography, translation, sermons, journalism. His works are more extensive than those of any other canonical English writer, and no earlier writer's life was documented as thoroughly by contemporaries. Because it's so difficult to know him thoroughly, people have made do with surrogates and simplifications. But Johnson was much more complicated than the popular image of 'Dr. Johnson' suggests: socially conservative but also one of the most radical abolitionists of his age, a firm believer in social hierarchy but an outspoken supporter of women intellectuals, an uncompromising Christian moralist but also a penetrating critic of family structures. Labels fit him poorly. In The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Johnson, an international team of thirty-six scholars offers the most comprehensive examination ever attempted of one of the most complex figures in English literature. The book's first section examines Johnson's life and the texts of his works; the second, organized by genre, explores all his major works and many of his minor ones; the third, organized by topic, covers the subjects that were most important to him as a writer, as a thinker, and as a moralist.
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 as Book Reviewer written by Brian Hanley and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critical analysis of Johnson's book reviews
Download or read book Religious Life of Samuel Johns written by Charles E. Pierce and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2000-12-01 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Samuel Johnson was a deeply religious man and he came to depend on his Christian faith as the principal means by which to endure the pain of existence. He sought throughout his life to render himself worthy of salvation, but the difficulties which he experienced in trying to maintain a high degree of religious discipline - as well as his doubts about God's ultimate concern for man and his fears of his own spiritual unworthiness - led him into periods of madness and a perpetual dread of damnation. Charles Pierce examines the effect of Johnson's religous concerns upon the formation of his complex character, and on the great moral writing that began with The Vanity of Human Wishes and ended with Rasselas. He explores the paradox of a life which was dedicated to the Christian ideal and tormented by that same ideal. Previous works on Johnson's religious beliefs have been concerned with ascertaining what those beliefs were, and not with their effect. The main theme of this study is the importance of Johnson's beliefs in the formation of his character and their effect on the moral values expressed in his greatest writing and on the conduct of his life. It will be essential to anyone interested in the life and thought of one of the greatest English literary figures.
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 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 Samuel Johnson the Ossian Fraud and the Celtic Revival in Great Britain and Ireland written by Thomas M. Curley and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-04-16 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James Macpherson's famous hoax, publishing his own poems as the writings of the ancient Scots bard Ossian in the 1760s, remains fascinating to scholars as the most successful literary fraud in history. This study presents the fullest investigation of his deception to date, by looking at the controversy from the point of view of Samuel Johnson. Johnson's dispute with Macpherson was an argument with wide implications not only for literature, but for the emerging national identities of the British nations during the Celtic revival. Thomas M. Curley offers a wealth of genuinely new information, detailing as never before Johnson's involvement in the Ossian controversy, his insistence on truth-telling, and his interaction with others in the debate. The appendix reproduces a rare pamphlet against Ossian written with the assistance of Johnson himself. This book will be an important addition to knowledge about both the Ossian controversy and Samuel Johnson.
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 Aspects of Samuel Johnson written by Howard D. Weinbrot and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
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 Samuel Johnson s Lives of the Poets written by Samuel Johnson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2006-02-16 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Samuel Johnson's last literary work, the Lives of the Poets, offers a detailed survey of English poetry from the early seventeenth century down to Johnson's own time. Always recognized as a major contribution to English biography and criticism, it is also one of Johnson's most readable and eloquent achievements. This is the first scholarly edition since 1905 and includes a full introduction and critical apparatus. This is volume two of four.
Download or read book Samuel Johnson and Biographical Thinking written by Catherine Neal Parke and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Catherine N. Parke offers new readings of Johnson's major prose writings, the familiar and the not so familiar. Through an inquiry into the centrality of biography in his thinking, she examines Johnson's ideas about education, portrays his habits of mind, and explores his creative temperment.
Download or read book Samuel Johnson s Lives of the Poets written by Roger Lonsdale and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2006-02-16 with total page 2220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Johnson himself wrote in 1782: 'I know not that I have written any thing more generally commended than the Lives of the Poets'. Always recognized as a major biographical and critical achievement, Samuel Johnson's last literary project is also one of his most readable and entertaining, written with characteristic eloquence and conviction, and at times with combative trenchancy. Johnson's fifty-two biographies constitute a detailed survey of English poetry from the early seventeenth century down to his own time, with extended discussions of Cowley, Milton, Waller, Dryden, Addison, Prior, Swift, Pope, and Gray. The Lives also include Johnson's memorable biography of the enigmatic Richard Savage (1744), the friend of his own early years in London. Roger Lonsdale's Introduction describes the origins, composition, and textual history of the Lives, and assesses Johnson's assumptions and aims as biographer and critic. The commentary provides a detailed literary and historical context, investigating Johnson's sources, relating the Lives to his own earlier writings and conversation, and to the critical opinions of his contemporaries, as well as illustrating their early reception. This is the first scholarly edition since George Birkbeck Hill's three-volume Oxford edition (1905). This is volume two of four.
Download or read book Samuel Johnson and the Art of Sinking 1709 1791 written by Freya Johnston and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2005-02-17 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Johnson's centrality in the late eighteenth century makes his fretfulness about the social and aesthetic boundaries of writing especially fertile and influential. This book suggests that literary taxonomies, inventories, and canons simultaneously construct and reject a hierarchy of ethical as well as aesthetic values, and examines how figures of cultural authority conceive of their relationships to and with the margins of writing and of society.
Download or read book The Interpretation of Samuel Johnson written by J. Clark and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-06-12 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major academic controversy has raged in recent years over the analysis of the political and religious commitments of Samuel Johnson, the most commanding of the 'commanding heights' of eighteenth-century English letters. This book, one of a trilogy from Palgrave, brings that debate to a decisive conclusion, retrieving the 'historic Johnson.'
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 Samuel Johnson A Biography written by John Wain and published by Crossroad Press. This book was released on 2017-09-12 with total page 622 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Wain presents a major biography of England's greatest man of letters. He describes how "Johnson often mixed with people who were desperate human wrecks, some of whom were close friends; to the end of his life he filled house with people who were not successes in the eyes of the world, yet at the same time he conversed on equal and better than equal terms with the most important and brilliant people of that time."
