Author: T F Wharton
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349174033
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 198
Book Description
Samuel Johnson and the Theme of Hope
Author: T F Wharton
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349174033
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 198
Book Description
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349174033
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 198
Book Description
Samuel Johnson and the Theme of Hope
Author: T. F. Wharton
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780312698614
Category : Hope in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 190
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780312698614
Category : Hope in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 190
Book Description
Samuel Johnson: An Analysis
Author: Charles H. Hinnant
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349192082
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 157
Book Description
In this provocative and incisive book the author re-examines Samuel Johnson's major texts, focusing on his famous review of Soame Jenyns's A Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil as a principal source of insight and innovation. He offers a lucid exposition of its ideas and methods, defining for the first time its relation to an important strand in eighteenth-century intellectual history, and assessing its implications for Johnson's moral vision. Hinnant's book will be an indispensable guide for anyone interested in understanding what is most modern in Johnson's thought and writings.
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349192082
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 157
Book Description
In this provocative and incisive book the author re-examines Samuel Johnson's major texts, focusing on his famous review of Soame Jenyns's A Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil as a principal source of insight and innovation. He offers a lucid exposition of its ideas and methods, defining for the first time its relation to an important strand in eighteenth-century intellectual history, and assessing its implications for Johnson's moral vision. Hinnant's book will be an indispensable guide for anyone interested in understanding what is most modern in Johnson's thought and writings.
The Vanity of Human Wishes
Author: Samuel Johnson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 28
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 28
Book Description
The Philosophical Biographer
Author: Martin Maner
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820333743
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 202
Book Description
The Philosophical Biographer shows how a shift in philosophical outlook in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries-from an understanding of human knowledge rooted in deductive certainties to one resting on inductive probability-influenced the development of biographical narrative in general and in particular the way Johnson dealt with biographical evidence in his Lives of the Poets. Examining the psychological and philosophical doubt that lay at the heart of Johnson's character and intellect, Martin Maner reveals in the biographical studies of Savage, Swift, Milton, and Pope an ingrained pattern of dialectical argument and a skeptical attitude toward evidence--a method that involves the reader in judgments about the poets as it conveys Johnson's own understanding of truth. In the Life of Savage, Johnson moves from thesis to antithesis, generating out of opposing emotional responses--irony and sympathy, ridicule and pathos-an understanding of the man. Dialectically undercutting the conclusions of previous biographers of Swift and Milton, Johnson fashions a new, somewhat acidic estimation of Swift and a portrait of Milton that engages contemporary questions of the probable and the marvelous. The Life of Pope, Johnson's greatest dialectical achievement, alternates between blame and praise, public and private realms, weaving tone, context, and analogy into great, contrasting patterns of inquiry and judgment. Establishing the centrality of a dialectical method in the Lives of the Poets, Martin Maner links the rise of biography as well as Johnson's interest in the form to the shift in epistemology brought about by empiricism. In the new patterns of thought of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, biography--the estimation of a life through sifting of historical events and evidence--was the most philosophical of endeavors, and Johnson its greatest practitioner.
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820333743
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 202
Book Description
The Philosophical Biographer shows how a shift in philosophical outlook in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries-from an understanding of human knowledge rooted in deductive certainties to one resting on inductive probability-influenced the development of biographical narrative in general and in particular the way Johnson dealt with biographical evidence in his Lives of the Poets. Examining the psychological and philosophical doubt that lay at the heart of Johnson's character and intellect, Martin Maner reveals in the biographical studies of Savage, Swift, Milton, and Pope an ingrained pattern of dialectical argument and a skeptical attitude toward evidence--a method that involves the reader in judgments about the poets as it conveys Johnson's own understanding of truth. In the Life of Savage, Johnson moves from thesis to antithesis, generating out of opposing emotional responses--irony and sympathy, ridicule and pathos-an understanding of the man. Dialectically undercutting the conclusions of previous biographers of Swift and Milton, Johnson fashions a new, somewhat acidic estimation of Swift and a portrait of Milton that engages contemporary questions of the probable and the marvelous. The Life of Pope, Johnson's greatest dialectical achievement, alternates between blame and praise, public and private realms, weaving tone, context, and analogy into great, contrasting patterns of inquiry and judgment. Establishing the centrality of a dialectical method in the Lives of the Poets, Martin Maner links the rise of biography as well as Johnson's interest in the form to the shift in epistemology brought about by empiricism. In the new patterns of thought of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, biography--the estimation of a life through sifting of historical events and evidence--was the most philosophical of endeavors, and Johnson its greatest practitioner.
Johnson, Rasselas, and the Choice of Criticism
Author: Edward Tomarken
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 081318570X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 322
Book Description
Although Rasselas has received more critical commentary than almost any other work by Samuel Johnson, Edward Tomarken's book is the first full length study to focus on his tale of the Prince of Abyssinia. This anomaly arises, as Tomarken shows, because Rasselas has remained resistant to the customary critical approaches of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, consistently eliciting new kinds of insights and raising new sorts of problems. Tomarken' s contribution is a new methodology to explain this phenomenon. He sees Johnson's early writings, London and Irene, as instances of the writer trying with only partial success to achieve what he first realized in The Vanity of Human Wishes, a means of permitting literary form to refer to conduct. Later works, such as The Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, are viewed as further developments of this method, which achieved its fullest expression in Rasselas and the Life of Pope. Such a reading of Johnson develops an aesthetic that operates on the margins between the literary and the extra-literary. Although Johnson's own critical view was unable to accommodate such a position, Tomarken shows that in practice he moved toward it by a process of trial and error manifest in his poetry and narratives. When raised to the level of critical method, this approach goes beyond the assumptions not only of Johnson's day but also of our own. Tomarken's theoretical coda demonstrates how the choices of current critical theory, like those in the marriage debate in Rasselas, can be understood to interact with one another. Specifically, he proposes a dialectical relationship for two approaches hermeneutics and structuralism-usually seen as opposed to one another. This innovative study will interest not only Johnson scholars but all those concerned with critical theory.
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 081318570X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 322
Book Description
Although Rasselas has received more critical commentary than almost any other work by Samuel Johnson, Edward Tomarken's book is the first full length study to focus on his tale of the Prince of Abyssinia. This anomaly arises, as Tomarken shows, because Rasselas has remained resistant to the customary critical approaches of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, consistently eliciting new kinds of insights and raising new sorts of problems. Tomarken' s contribution is a new methodology to explain this phenomenon. He sees Johnson's early writings, London and Irene, as instances of the writer trying with only partial success to achieve what he first realized in The Vanity of Human Wishes, a means of permitting literary form to refer to conduct. Later works, such as The Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, are viewed as further developments of this method, which achieved its fullest expression in Rasselas and the Life of Pope. Such a reading of Johnson develops an aesthetic that operates on the margins between the literary and the extra-literary. Although Johnson's own critical view was unable to accommodate such a position, Tomarken shows that in practice he moved toward it by a process of trial and error manifest in his poetry and narratives. When raised to the level of critical method, this approach goes beyond the assumptions not only of Johnson's day but also of our own. Tomarken's theoretical coda demonstrates how the choices of current critical theory, like those in the marriage debate in Rasselas, can be understood to interact with one another. Specifically, he proposes a dialectical relationship for two approaches hermeneutics and structuralism-usually seen as opposed to one another. This innovative study will interest not only Johnson scholars but all those concerned with critical theory.
This Invisible Riot of the Mind
Author: Gloria Sybil Gross
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512802298
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 212
Book Description
In This Invisible Riot of the Mind, Gloria Sybil Gross contends that Samuel Johnson was a pioneer in the development of modern psychological thought, challenging the timeworn, stilted typecasting of Samuel Johnson as the pious Christian moralist. Instead, she argues that Johnson was a daring, at times irreverent, explorer of human nature, who strenuously rejected old relics of sanctimony and repressive authority. To make her case, Gross draws on a wide range of materials from Johnson's life and works, as well as from eighteenth-century medical psychology. Throughout, she is scrupulous in analyzing Johnson's psychological thought within the cultural idiom that would have been available to him. At the same time, she employs a classical psychoanalytic approach, that seeks to establish a coherent relationship among Johnson's life, his fantasies, and his creative work. This reading of Johnson reveals the radical direction of his investigations of mental experience, which put him in clear prospect of the basic premises underlying Freudian psychoanalysis. Gross argues that these premises—the principle of psychological determinism, the view of the mind as dictated by forces in conflict, the concept of the dynamic unconscious, and the submerged power of desire in all human activity—pervade Johnson's writings. Gross demonstrates not only that Johnson can profitably be read in psychoanalytic terms, but that Johnson is a psychological theorist of primary importance. This original and insightful work will be of interest to students and scholars of English literature, eighteenth-century studies, and literature and psychology.
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512802298
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 212
Book Description
In This Invisible Riot of the Mind, Gloria Sybil Gross contends that Samuel Johnson was a pioneer in the development of modern psychological thought, challenging the timeworn, stilted typecasting of Samuel Johnson as the pious Christian moralist. Instead, she argues that Johnson was a daring, at times irreverent, explorer of human nature, who strenuously rejected old relics of sanctimony and repressive authority. To make her case, Gross draws on a wide range of materials from Johnson's life and works, as well as from eighteenth-century medical psychology. Throughout, she is scrupulous in analyzing Johnson's psychological thought within the cultural idiom that would have been available to him. At the same time, she employs a classical psychoanalytic approach, that seeks to establish a coherent relationship among Johnson's life, his fantasies, and his creative work. This reading of Johnson reveals the radical direction of his investigations of mental experience, which put him in clear prospect of the basic premises underlying Freudian psychoanalysis. Gross argues that these premises—the principle of psychological determinism, the view of the mind as dictated by forces in conflict, the concept of the dynamic unconscious, and the submerged power of desire in all human activity—pervade Johnson's writings. Gross demonstrates not only that Johnson can profitably be read in psychoanalytic terms, but that Johnson is a psychological theorist of primary importance. This original and insightful work will be of interest to students and scholars of English literature, eighteenth-century studies, and literature and psychology.
Encyclopedia of the Essay
Author: Tracy Chevalier
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135314101
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 1032
Book Description
This groundbreaking new source of international scope defines the essay as nonfictional prose texts of between one and 50 pages in length. The more than 500 entries by 275 contributors include entries on nationalities, various categories of essays such as generic (such as sermons, aphorisms), individual major works, notable writers, and periodicals that created a market for essays, and particularly famous or significant essays. The preface details the historical development of the essay, and the alphabetically arranged entries usually include biographical sketch, nationality, era, selected writings list, additional readings, and anthologies
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135314101
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 1032
Book Description
This groundbreaking new source of international scope defines the essay as nonfictional prose texts of between one and 50 pages in length. The more than 500 entries by 275 contributors include entries on nationalities, various categories of essays such as generic (such as sermons, aphorisms), individual major works, notable writers, and periodicals that created a market for essays, and particularly famous or significant essays. The preface details the historical development of the essay, and the alphabetically arranged entries usually include biographical sketch, nationality, era, selected writings list, additional readings, and anthologies
The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Johnson
Author: Jack Lynch
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192513591
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 705
Book Description
No major author worked in more genres than Samuel Johnson—essays, poetry, fiction, criticism, biography, scholarly editing, lexicography, translation, sermons, journalism. His works are more extensive than those of any other canonical English writer, and no earlier writer's life was documented as thoroughly by contemporaries. Because it's so difficult to know him thoroughly, people have made do with surrogates and simplifications. But Johnson was much more complicated than the popular image of 'Dr. Johnson' suggests: socially conservative but also one of the most radical abolitionists of his age, a firm believer in social hierarchy but an outspoken supporter of women intellectuals, an uncompromising Christian moralist but also a penetrating critic of family structures. Labels fit him poorly. In The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Johnson, an international team of thirty-six scholars offers the most comprehensive examination ever attempted of one of the most complex figures in English literature. The book's first section examines Johnson's life and the texts of his works; the second, organized by genre, explores all his major works and many of his minor ones; the third, organized by topic, covers the subjects that were most important to him as a writer, as a thinker, and as a moralist.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192513591
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 705
Book Description
No major author worked in more genres than Samuel Johnson—essays, poetry, fiction, criticism, biography, scholarly editing, lexicography, translation, sermons, journalism. His works are more extensive than those of any other canonical English writer, and no earlier writer's life was documented as thoroughly by contemporaries. Because it's so difficult to know him thoroughly, people have made do with surrogates and simplifications. But Johnson was much more complicated than the popular image of 'Dr. Johnson' suggests: socially conservative but also one of the most radical abolitionists of his age, a firm believer in social hierarchy but an outspoken supporter of women intellectuals, an uncompromising Christian moralist but also a penetrating critic of family structures. Labels fit him poorly. In The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Johnson, an international team of thirty-six scholars offers the most comprehensive examination ever attempted of one of the most complex figures in English literature. The book's first section examines Johnson's life and the texts of his works; the second, organized by genre, explores all his major works and many of his minor ones; the third, organized by topic, covers the subjects that were most important to him as a writer, as a thinker, and as a moralist.
Samuel Johnson and the Age of Travel
Author: Thomas M. Curley
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820333786
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 302
Book Description
Although Samuel Johnson's famed ramblings never took him more than five hundred miles from his London home, he was an indefatigable planner of distant voyages. Sharing with his fellow Englishmen that passion for investigating the unknown which had ushered in a momentous geographical revolution, Johnson became the original armchair traveler. His writings proclaim a boundless curiosity about the globe and demonstrate a pervasive preoccupation with travel in every conceivable form. Travel represented more for him than geographical movement; it was a symbol of intellectual growth in his life, his morality, and his society. While Johnson's biographers have all emphasized his fascination with exploration and discovery, no comprehensive study of his complex relationship to the epoch-making geographical advances of his century has heretofore appeared. Thomas Curley's Samuel Johnson and the Age of Travel offers new perspectives on this crucial and surprisingly little-known concern of the man and his age, when English literature brilliantly mirrored the widening frontiers of the British Empire. Drawing extensively on Johnson's entire canon, the works of his contemporaries, and a vast store of much neglected travel books, Curley places Johnson's love of travel and travel literature firmly in its literary and historical contexts. Johnson's career began with the translation of a travel book, yielded numerous articles and essays on the subject in his middle years, and culminated in the publication of his own splendid description of the Highlands in A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. Keenly interested in geography, Johnson studied well over two centuries of travel literature to validate his own philosophy of human nature and to promote improved literary standards in what was then the second most popular genre in England. His masterpiece, Rasselas, not only enshrined his recurring vision of man as perpetual explorer but also exemplified that fruitful interaction between travel books and belles-lettres so prevalent throughout Johnson's age. Samuel Johnson and the Age of Travel sheds new light on Johnson's career ambitions, his talents in moral observation and literary creation, and his inquisitive age. Johnson emerges in Curley's study as a truly representative writer completely captivated by the romance of Georgian travel and illustrative of the cultural impact of an expanding world picture upon the minds and letter of eighteenth-century Englishmen.
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820333786
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 302
Book Description
Although Samuel Johnson's famed ramblings never took him more than five hundred miles from his London home, he was an indefatigable planner of distant voyages. Sharing with his fellow Englishmen that passion for investigating the unknown which had ushered in a momentous geographical revolution, Johnson became the original armchair traveler. His writings proclaim a boundless curiosity about the globe and demonstrate a pervasive preoccupation with travel in every conceivable form. Travel represented more for him than geographical movement; it was a symbol of intellectual growth in his life, his morality, and his society. While Johnson's biographers have all emphasized his fascination with exploration and discovery, no comprehensive study of his complex relationship to the epoch-making geographical advances of his century has heretofore appeared. Thomas Curley's Samuel Johnson and the Age of Travel offers new perspectives on this crucial and surprisingly little-known concern of the man and his age, when English literature brilliantly mirrored the widening frontiers of the British Empire. Drawing extensively on Johnson's entire canon, the works of his contemporaries, and a vast store of much neglected travel books, Curley places Johnson's love of travel and travel literature firmly in its literary and historical contexts. Johnson's career began with the translation of a travel book, yielded numerous articles and essays on the subject in his middle years, and culminated in the publication of his own splendid description of the Highlands in A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. Keenly interested in geography, Johnson studied well over two centuries of travel literature to validate his own philosophy of human nature and to promote improved literary standards in what was then the second most popular genre in England. His masterpiece, Rasselas, not only enshrined his recurring vision of man as perpetual explorer but also exemplified that fruitful interaction between travel books and belles-lettres so prevalent throughout Johnson's age. Samuel Johnson and the Age of Travel sheds new light on Johnson's career ambitions, his talents in moral observation and literary creation, and his inquisitive age. Johnson emerges in Curley's study as a truly representative writer completely captivated by the romance of Georgian travel and illustrative of the cultural impact of an expanding world picture upon the minds and letter of eighteenth-century Englishmen.