Print, Chaos, and Complexity : Samuel Johnson and Eighteenth-Century Media Culture

by Wildermuth, Mark E.

• ISBN13: 9780874130324
• ISBN10: 0874130328
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-08-30
• Publisher: Associated Univ Pr

Summary

"This book describes how eighteenth-century awareness of the interplay between fixity and instability in printed texts demonstrates the role print played in developing Samuel Johnson's perception of print culture's impact on human beings ethically, politically, and aesthetically. Drawing on the scholarship of Adrian Johns and David McKitterick, the study traces the evolution and continuity of Johnson's ideas in these areas by describing the importance of print mediation for Johnson's conception of the related epistemological and ethical dilemmas facing his generation from the Restoration to the late eighteenth century"--BOOK JACKET.

Author Biography

Mark E. Wildermuth is a Professor of English Literature and a Dunagan Research Fellow at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. 9
Introduction	p. 13
Textual Instability, Print, and Complex Dynamics in the Johnsonian Mediated Cultural Milieu	p. 25
Pope as a Precursor to Johnson: The Mediation of Chaos and Order in An Essay on Man	p. 62
Complexity and Mediated Culture in Johnson's Moral Periodical Prose	p. 88
Johnson's Politics in the Milieu of Informatics	p. 109
Samuel Johnson, Mediation, Representation, and the Aesthetics of Complex Dynamics	p. 135
Conclusion	p. 163
Notes	p. 171
Bibliography	p. 186
Index	p. 194
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