Samuel Johnson after 300 Years

by Edited by Greg Clingham , Philip Smallwood

• ISBN13: 9780521888219
• ISBN10: 0521888212
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-07-06
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

To mark the tercentenary of Samuel Johnson's birth, specially-commissioned essays review his scholarly reputation today. 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 new 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.

Table of Contents

Introduction. Johnson now and in time

'We are perpetually moralists': Johnson and moral philosophy

Johnson, ends, and the possibility of happiness

Johnson and the modern: the forward face of Janus

Samuel Johnson's politics of contingency Clement

Fideism, the antisublime, and the faithful imagination in Rasselas

Samuel Johnson's legal thought

The life of Johnson, The Life of Johnson, the lives of

The awkward

Johnson's criticism, the arts, and the idea of art

Toil and envy: unsuccessful responses to Johnson's Lives of the Poets

Early women reading

Johnson and Austen

The Works of Samuel Johnson and the

What Johnson means to me

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.