The Age of Johnson

The Age of Johnson PDF Author: Jack Lynch
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1684483018
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
Volume 24 features commentary on a range of Johnsonian topics: his reaction to Milton, his relation to the Allen family, his notes in his edition of Shakespeare, his use of Oliver Goldsmith in his Dictionary, and his always fascinating Nachleben. The volume also includes articles on topics of strong interest to Johnson: penal reform, Charlotte Lennox's professional literary career, and the "conjectural history" of Homer in the eighteenth century.

The Age of Johnson

The Age of Johnson PDF Author: Jack Lynch
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1684483018
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
Volume 24 features commentary on a range of Johnsonian topics: his reaction to Milton, his relation to the Allen family, his notes in his edition of Shakespeare, his use of Oliver Goldsmith in his Dictionary, and his always fascinating Nachleben. The volume also includes articles on topics of strong interest to Johnson: penal reform, Charlotte Lennox's professional literary career, and the "conjectural history" of Homer in the eighteenth century.

Loving Dr. Johnson

Loving Dr. Johnson PDF Author: Helen Deutsch
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226143856
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
The autopsy of Samuel Johnson (1709-84) initiated two centuries of Johnsonian anatomy-both in medical speculation about his famously unruly body and in literary devotion to his anecdotal remains. Even today, Johnson is an enduring symbol of individuality, authority, masculinity, and Englishness, ultimately lending a style and a name—the Age of Johnson—to the eighteenth-century English literary canon. Loving Dr. Johnson uses the enormous popularity of Johnson to understand a singular case of author love and to reflect upon what the love of authors has to do with the love of literature. Helen Deutsch's work is driven by several impulses, among them her affection for both Johnson's work and Boswell's biography of him, and her own distance from the largely male tradition of Johnsonian criticism—a tradition to which she remains indebted and to which Loving Dr. Johnson is ultimately an homage. Limning sharply Johnson's capacious oeuvre, Deutsch's study is also the first of its kind to examine the practices and rituals of Johnsonian societies around the world, wherein Johnson's literary work is now dwarfed by the figure of the writer himself. An absorbing look at one iconic author and his afterlives, Loving Dr. Johnson will be of enormous value to students of English literature and literary scholars keenly interested in canon formation.

The Wreckage of Intentions

The Wreckage of Intentions PDF Author: David Alff
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812294459
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Britain saw the proposal of so many endeavors called "projects"—a catchphrase for the daring, sometimes dangerous practice of shaping the future—that Daniel Defoe dubbed his era a "Projecting Age." These ideas spanned a wide variety of scientific, technological, and intellectual interventions intended for the betterment of England. But for all the fanfare surrounding them, few such schemes actually materialized, leaving scores of defunct visions, from Defoe's own attempt to farm cats for perfume, to Mary Astell's proposal to charter a college for women, to countless ventures for improving land, streamlining government, and inventing new consumer goods. Taken together, these failed plans form a compelling alternative history of a Britain that might have been. The Wreckage of Intentions offers a comprehensive and critical account of projects, exploring the historical memory surrounding these concrete yet incomplete efforts to advance British society during a period defined by revolutions in finance and agriculture, the rise of experimental science, and the establishment of constitutional monarchy. Using methods of literary analysis, David Alff shows how projects began as written proposals, circulated as print objects, spurred physical undertakings, and provoked responses in the realms of poetry, fiction, and drama. Mapping this process discloses the ways in which eighteenth-century authors applied their faculties of imagination to achieve finite goals and, in so doing, devised new ways of seeing the world through its future potential. Approaching old projects through the language, landscapes, data, and personas they left behind, Alff contends this vision was, and remains, vital to the functions of statecraft, commerce, science, religion, and literature.

Temora, an Ancient Epic Poem, in Eight Books:

Temora, an Ancient Epic Poem, in Eight Books: PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary forgeries and mystifications
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description


The Age of Johnson

The Age of Johnson PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 562

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Book Description


The Age of Johnson

The Age of Johnson PDF Author: Jack Lynch
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1684483026
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
The move to a new publisher has given The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual the opportunity to recommit to what it does best: present to a wide readership cant-free scholarly articles and essays and searching book reviews, all featuring a wide variety of approaches, written by both seasoned scholars and relative newcomers. Volume 24 features commentary on a range of Johnsonian topics: his reaction to Milton, his relation to the Allen family, his notes in his edition of Shakespeare, his use of Oliver Goldsmith in his Dictionary, and his always fascinating Nachleben. The volume also includes articles on topics of strong interest to Johnson: penal reform, Charlotte Lennox's professional literary career, and the "conjectural history" of Homer in the eighteenth century. For more than two decades, The Age of Johnson has presented a vast corpus of Johnsonian studies "in the broadest sense," as founding editor Paul J. Korshin put it in the preface to Volume 1, and it has retained the interest of a wide readership. In thousands of pages of articles, review essays, and reviews, The Age of Johnson has made a permanent contribution to our understanding of the eighteenth century, and particularly of Samuel Johnson, his circle, and his interests, and has also served as an outlet for writers who are not academics but have something important to say about the eighteenth century. ISSN 0884-5816.

The Club

The Club PDF Author: Leo Damrosch
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300244967
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 498

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Book Description
Prize-winning biographer Leo Damrosch tells the story of “the Club,” a group of extraordinary writers, artists, and thinkers who gathered weekly at a London tavern In 1763, the painter Joshua Reynolds proposed to his friend Samuel Johnson that they invite a few friends to join them every Friday at the Turk’s Head Tavern in London to dine, drink, and talk until midnight. Eventually the group came to include among its members Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, and James Boswell. It was known simply as “the Club.” In this captivating book, Leo Damrosch brings alive a brilliant, competitive, and eccentric cast of characters. With the friendship of the “odd couple” Samuel Johnson and James Boswell at the heart of his narrative, Damrosch conjures up the precarious, exciting, and often brutal world of late eighteenth-century Britain. This is the story of an extraordinary group of people whose ideas helped to shape their age, and our own.

The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson

The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson PDF Author: Jack Lynch
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139434918
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
In The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson, Jack Lynch explores eighteenth-century British conceptions of the Renaissance, and the historical, intellectual, and cultural uses to which the past was put during the period. Scholars, editors, historians, religious thinkers, linguists and literary critics of the period all defined themselves in relation to 'the last age' or 'the age of Elizabeth'. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers reworked older historical schemes to suit their own needs, turning to the ages of Petrarch and Poliziano, Erasmus and Scaliger, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Queen Elizabeth to define their culture in contrast to the preceding age. They derived a powerful sense of modernity from the comparison, which proved essential to the constitution of a national character. This interdisciplinary study will be of interest to cultural as well as literary historians of the eighteenth century.

Samuel Johnson and Three Infidels

Samuel Johnson and Three Infidels PDF Author: Mark J. Temmer
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820333751
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
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.

A History of Literary Criticism

A History of Literary Criticism PDF Author: Harry Blamires
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1349214957
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 423

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Book Description
The author traces the course of literary criticism from its foundations in classical and medieval precepts to the theorising of the present day. He explores the texts which have been milestones in the history of critical thought, placing them firmly in the context of their time.