Download or read book Samuel Johnson written by Peter Martin and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2012-08-16 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first new biography for a generation of one of the great figures of English literature Poet, essayist, biographer, lexicographer, critic, conversationalist and wit, Dr Johnson is one of the great figures of English literature, perhaps the most quoted English writer after Shakespeare. Our view of Johnson has been overwhelmingly shaped by James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, published in 1791, the most famous biography in the English language. But invaluable as Boswell is as a source, he should not be the last word. This new biography illuminates the Johnson that Boswell never knew: the awkward youth, the unsuccessful schoolmaster, the eccentric marriage, his early years in London in the 1740s scratching a living, the epic struggle to produce the Dictionary. Very much the outsider, rather than the supremely confident dispenser of robust common sense. Using material unknown to previous biographers, Peter Martin describes the psychological knife-edge on which Johnson felt he lived, caused by his severe melancholia and his physical diseases. He explores Johnson's role in the publishing and printing world of the time and he reveals how important women were to Johnson throughout his life. The Samuel Johnson that emerges from this enthralling biography is still the foremost figure of his age but a more rebellious, unpredictable and sympathetic figure than the one that Boswell so memorably portrayed.
Download or read book Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing written by Paul Fussell and published by W W Norton & Company Incorporated. This book was released on 1986 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focuses on the struggles and pressures which attended the literary career of the eighteenth-century figure
Download or read book Samuel Johnson written by David Nokes and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2010 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this groundbreaking portrait of Samuel Johnson, Nokes positions the great thinker in his rightful place as an active force in the Enlightenment, not a mere recorder or performer, and demonstrates how his interaction with life impacted his work.
Download or read book Samuel Johnson written by Samuel Johnson and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-05 with total page 853 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A one-volume collection of the prose and poetry of eighteenth-century Britain’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 Yale Edition.
Download or read book Samuel Johnson written by W. Jackson Bate and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2009-08-18 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Samuel Johnson is a writer of such significance that his era — the second half of the 18th century — is known as the Age of Johnson. Starting out as a Grub Street journalist, he made his mark on history as a poet, author, moralist, literary critic, political commentator, and lexiconographer. We, as moderns, need to know this man, and W. Jackson Bate's formidable biography, with its uncanny depth and empathy, is the book that makes that happen. Professor W. Jackson Bate is a lyrical writer who deftly explains the effect Johnson has had on scholars, critics, and readers of all kinds through the past 200 years: "The reason Johnson has always fascinated so many people of different kinds," Bate writes, "is not simply that [he] is so vividly picturesque and quotable . . . The deeper secret of his hypnotic attraction, especially during our own generation, lies in the immense reassurance he gives to human nature." Bate delves deep into the character that formed Johnson's intellect and fueled his prodigious contribution to literature, religion, politics, and our understanding of the nature of humankind, revealing the fascinating nature — both odd and adored — of this literary luminary.
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 written by Jeffrey Meyers and published by Oldcastle Books Ltd. This book was released on 2015-11-27 with total page 543 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jeffrey Meyers tells the extraordinary story of Samuel Johnson one of the most illustrious figures of English literary tradition. Johnson was famous as a poet, novelist, biographer, essayist, critic, editor, lexicographer, conversationalist and larger than life personality. After nine years of work Johnson's, 'A dictionary of the English Language, was published in 1755. He overcame great adversity to achieve success. 'The Struggle' is a masterful portrait of a brilliant and tormented figure.
Download or read book The Life of Samuel Johnson LL D written by James Boswell and published by . This book was released on 1826 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Works of Samuel Johnson LL D written by Samuel Johnson and published by . This book was released on 1824 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Life of Samuel Johnson LL D written by John Hawkins and published by . This book was released on 1787 with total page 636 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Samuel Johnson and Three Infidels written by Mark J. Temmer and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: European literary history teems with prejudices. Nowhere perhaps is bias more evident than in the field of Anglo-French relations of the eighteenth century. In England looms the formidable figure of Samuel Johnson, while the French-speaking world is dominated by Rousseau, Voltaire, and Diderot. Samuel Johnson thought little of Voltaire and never mentioned Diderot. That he wanted to banish Rousseau to the American colonies is well known. All three men were, in Johnson's mind, infidels to the Christian order of society. In Samuel Johnson and Three Infidels, Mark Temmer reevaluates dogmatic views and critical commonplaces that have encrusted these relationships by comparing representative works of the three Continental authors to corresponding works and realities embodied and created by Samuel Johnson. After reviewing existing harmonies and dissonances between France and England, Temmer turns to the lives of Johnson and Rousseau, interpreting them as ontological masterpieces made visible mainly in Rousseau's Confessions and in biographies of Johnson by James Boswell and Hester Piozzi, both of whom insist on remarkable affinities between the two men. In the words of Mrs. Piozzi, they were "alike as sensations of frost and fire." Despite their opposing doctrines, Temmer reveals a pietism in Rousseau that often matches in intensity Johnson's otherworldly yearnings. Temmer moves from this comparison into a discussion of Candide and Rasselas, works published within months of each other in 1759. Integrating Voltaire's satire and Johnson's moral tale into the philosophical history of the age, Temmer goes on to uncover shared moments of laughter and music, ringing out against the gray background of a life in which, for both men, "much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed." Finally, exploring Johnson's Life of Richard Savage and Diderot's Le Neveu de Rameau, Temmer suggests the strong possibility that Diderot's masterpiece may have been influenced by Johnson's biography as well as by Savage's own An Author to be Lett. In this book, Temmer moves beyond the boundaries that have traditionally defined eighteenth-century scholarship on either shore of the English Channel. Creating a cross-cultural conversation bounded only by the lives and interests of his subjects, Temmer relates Johnson to Continental literature and defines his innovative role in a tradition that leads to Hegel, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche.
Download or read book The Lives of the Poets written by Samuel Johnson and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2009-05-28 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'If a man is to write A Panegyrick, he may keep vices out of sight; but if he professes to write A Life, he must represent it really as it was.' In the last of his major writings, Samuel Johnson looked back over the previous two centuries of English Literature in order to describe the personalities as well as the achievements of the leading English poets. The major Lives - of Milton, Dryden, Swift, and Pope - are memorable cameos of the life of writing in which Johnson is as attentive to human frailty as to literary prowess. The shorter Lives preserve some of Johnson's most piercing, critical judgements. Unsentimental, opinionated, and quotable, The Lives of the Poets continues to influence the reputations of the writers concerned. It is one of the greatest works of English criticism, but also one of the most humanly diverting. This selection of the Lives of ten of the most important poets draws its text from Roger Lonsdale's authoritative complete edition. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
Download or read book Samuel Johnson and the Sense of History written by John A. Vance and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No area of Johnsonian studies has been less appreciated and more misunderstood than Johnson's response to history. Popular notions to the effect that he was insensitive to history have discouraged scholars and critics from discovering the role history played in his thinking. In this first book-length investigation of the subject, John A. Vance concludes that few misconceptions about Samuel Johnson have been so glaring as his supposed dislike of history. More specifically, in separate chapters Vance examines the development of Johnson's historical sense--from his readings, heritage, and travels to historical sites; Johnson's recall and use of historical figures and events, most notably the seventeenth-century attitude toward the most maligned member of the historical family, antiquarianism. The author also devotes two chapters to Johnson's historical writings--that is, those works in which he either incorporates history into his critical, biographical, and political discussions or those in which he clearly assumes the role of historian himself. Vance furthermore considers Johnson's views on historical facts, educative and moral history, the broadening scope of historical investigation, the nature of historical truth and skepticism, historical research, historical causation, and the historian's style.
Download or read book Boswell s Presumptuous Task written by Adam Sisman and published by HarperPerennial. This book was released on 2006 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With great wit, Sisman here tells the story of Boswell's presumptuous task--the making of the greatest biography of all time. Sisman traces the friendship between Boswell and Samuel Johnson, his mentor, and provides a fascinating account of Boswell's seven-year struggle to write "The Life of Samuel Johnson."
Download or read book Samuel Johnson s Eternal Return written by Martin Riker and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After he dies, Samuel Johnson inhabits one body after the next, waiting for a chance to return to his son.
Download or read book Dr Johnson S Works written by Samuel Johnson and published by Legare Street Press. This book was released on 2022-10-27 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Download or read book The Lives of the English Poets written by and published by . This book was released on 1961 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
