Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson PDF Author: Jeffrey Meyers
Publisher: Oldcastle Books Ltd
ISBN: 1904915507
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 543

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson PDF Author: Jeffrey Meyers
Publisher: Oldcastle Books Ltd
ISBN: 1904915507
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 543

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson PDF Author: Peter Martin
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 0297856162
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

New Light on Boswell

New Light on Boswell PDF Author: Greg Clingham
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521380472
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 259

Get Book Here

Book Description
A collection of essays first published in 1991 to commemorate the bicentenary of Boswell's Life of Johnson.

Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson PDF Author: David Nokes
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 080508651X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 469

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson PDF Author: Lawrence Lipking
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674040281
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 396

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

New Essays on Samuel Johnson

New Essays on Samuel Johnson PDF Author: Anthony W. Lee
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611496799
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 285

Get Book Here

Book Description
New Essays on Samuel Johnson: Revaluation is a collection of essays by various hands that examines its point of focus, the inexhaustible English author Samuel Johnson, from a variety of different critical perspectives. The book also simultaneously interrogates particular texts (such as the Dictionary, the Lives of the Poets) alongside general themes (such as Johnson and intertextuality, Johnson and autobiography). The word “revaluation” from the title connotes both the deployment of specifically au courant approaches—viewing, for example, Johnson in relation to climate change, or Johnson and the notion of “osmology”—as well as more general reflections upon Johnson’s importance to our present cultural and temporal moment.

Johnson Re-Visioned

Johnson Re-Visioned PDF Author: Philip Smallwood
Publisher: Associated University Presse
ISBN: 9780838757420
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 184

Get Book Here

Book Description
How far does Johnson's mind touch the critical consciousness, and how far is the modern experience of his writings a form of historical knowledge? This title includes essays by British and American scholars who seek to answer these questions from a sequence of argued perspectives.

Aspects of Samuel Johnson

Aspects of Samuel Johnson PDF Author: Howard D. Weinbrot
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 9780874138740
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 436

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson PDF Author: James James Lowry Clifford
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9781452911564
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 704

Get Book Here

Book Description


Samuel Johnson in Context

Samuel Johnson in Context PDF Author: John T. Lynch
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 052119010X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 473

Get Book Here

Book Description
A work of reference on 'the age of Johnson', putting literature in the context of the society that produced it.