The Reformist Ideas of Samuel Johnson

The Reformist Ideas of Samuel Johnson PDF Author: Stefka Ritchie
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443879126
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
This book explores what remains an under-studied aspect of Samuel Johnson’s profile as a person and writer – namely, his attitude to social improvement. The interpretive framework provided here is cross-disciplinary, and applies perspectives from social and cultural history, legal history, architectural history and, of course, English literature. This allows Johnson’s writings to be read against the peculiarities of their historical milieu, and reveals Johnson in a new light – as an advocate of social improvement for human betterment. Considering the multiplicity of narrative modes that have been employed, the book points to the blurred boundaries and overlapping between history, testimony and fiction, and argues that a future biography of Samuel Johnson has to recognise that throughout his life he valued the utilitarian aspect of his manifesto as a writer to impart a more charitable attitude in the pursuit of a more caring society.

The Reformist Ideas of Samuel Johnson

The Reformist Ideas of Samuel Johnson PDF Author: Stefka Ritchie
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443879126
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 315

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book explores what remains an under-studied aspect of Samuel Johnson’s profile as a person and writer – namely, his attitude to social improvement. The interpretive framework provided here is cross-disciplinary, and applies perspectives from social and cultural history, legal history, architectural history and, of course, English literature. This allows Johnson’s writings to be read against the peculiarities of their historical milieu, and reveals Johnson in a new light – as an advocate of social improvement for human betterment. Considering the multiplicity of narrative modes that have been employed, the book points to the blurred boundaries and overlapping between history, testimony and fiction, and argues that a future biography of Samuel Johnson has to recognise that throughout his life he valued the utilitarian aspect of his manifesto as a writer to impart a more charitable attitude in the pursuit of a more caring society.

The Interpretation of Samuel Johnson

The Interpretation of Samuel Johnson PDF Author: J. Clark
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137264721
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
A major academic controversy has raged in recent years over the analysis of the political and religious commitments of Samuel Johnson, the most commanding of the 'commanding heights' of eighteenth-century English letters. This book, one of a trilogy from Palgrave, brings that debate to a decisive conclusion, retrieving the 'historic Johnson.'

Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson PDF Author: Timothy Wilson-Smith
Publisher: Haus Publishing
ISBN: 9781904341819
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) is one of the pre-eminent figures of 18th century English letters.

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness PDF Author: Peter Moore
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374600600
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
“Gripping . . . Vibrant . . . A wonderfully absorbing and stimulating book.” —Sarah Bakewell, NBCC Award–winning author of How to Live and Humanly Possible “[A] rollicking account . . . The book’s compulsive readability is a tribute to Moore’s skill at cracking open the pre-revolutionary period.” —Charles Arrowsmith, The Washington Post A spirited group biography that explores the origins of the most iconic words in American history, and the remarkable transatlantic context from which they emerged. The most famous phrase in American history once looked quite different. “The preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness” was how Thomas Jefferson put it in the first draft of the Declaration, before the first ampersand was scratched out, along with “the preservation of.” In a statement as pithy—and contested—as this, a small deletion matters. And indeed, that final, iconizing revision was the last in a long chain of revisions stretching across the Atlantic and back. The precise contours of these three rights have never been pinned down—and yet in making these words into rights, Jefferson reified the hopes (and debates) not only of a group of rebel-statesmen but also of an earlier generation of British thinkers who could barely imagine a country like the United States of America. Peter Moore’s Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness tells the true story of what may be the most successful import in US history: the “American dream.” Centered on the friendship between Benjamin Franklin and the British publisher William Strahan, and featuring figures including the cultural giant Samuel Johnson, the ground-breaking historian Catharine Macaulay, the firebrand politician John Wilkes, and revolutionary activist Thomas Paine, this book looks at the generation that preceded the Declaration in 1776. Everyone, it seemed, had “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” on their minds; Moore shows why, and reveals how these still-nascent ideals made their way across an ocean and started a revolution. Includes 16 pages of black-and-white images

Nightwalking

Nightwalking PDF Author: Matthew Beaumont
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 178168796X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 595

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Book Description
A captivating literary portrait of London explored at night by some of the city’s most iconic writers throughout history “Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night,” wrote the poet Rupert Brooke. Before the age of electricity, the nighttime city was a very different place to the one we know today – home to the lost, the vagrant and the noctambulant. Matthew Beaumont recounts an alternative history of London by focusing on those of its denizens who surface on the streets when the sun’s down. If nightwalking is a matter of “going astray” in the streets of the metropolis after dark, then nightwalkers represent some of the most suggestive and revealing guides to the neglected and forgotten aspects of the city. In this brilliant work of literary investigation, Beaumont shines a light on the shadowy perambulations of poets, novelists and thinkers: Chaucer and Shakespeare; William Blake and his ecstatic peregrinations and the feverish ramblings of opium addict Thomas De Quincey; and, among the lamp-lit literary throng, the supreme nightwalker Charles Dickens. We discover how the nocturnal city has inspired some and served as a balm or narcotic to others. In each case, the city is revealed as a place divided between work and pleasure, the affluent and the indigent, where the entitled and the desperate jostle in the streets. With a foreword and afterword by Will Self, Nightwalking is a fascinating literary exploration of the writers who traverse the city at night and the people they meet.

Loving Dr. Johnson

Loving Dr. Johnson PDF Author: Helen Deutsch
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226143856
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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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.

Samuel Johnson After 300 Years

Samuel Johnson After 300 Years PDF Author: Greg Clingham
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521888212
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
To mark the tercentenary of Samuel Johnson's birth in 2009, the specially-commissioned essays contained here review his scholarly reputation. 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 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.

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

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

Who's who in Early Hanoverian Britain, 1714-1789

Who's who in Early Hanoverian Britain, 1714-1789 PDF Author: G. R. R. Treasure
Publisher: Stackpole Books
ISBN: 9780811716437
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 550

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Book Description
Profiles historically significant men and women who lived in Britain during the reigns of George I, II and III.

Samuel Johnson and the Powers of Friendship

Samuel Johnson and the Powers of Friendship PDF Author: A. D. Cousins
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000990311
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
This book is the first to assess Johnson’s diverse insights into friendship—that is to say, his profound as well as widely ranging appreciation of it—over the course of his long literary career. It examines his engagements with ancient philosophies of friendship and with subsequent reformulations of or departures from that diverse inheritance. The volume explores and illuminates Johnson’s understanding of friendship in the private and public spheres—in particular, friendship’s therapeutic amelioration of personal experience and transformative impact upon civil life. Doing so, it considers both his portrayals of interaction with his friends and his more overtly fictional representations of friendship across the many genres in which he wrote. It presents at once an original re-assessment of Johnson’s writings and new interpretations of friendship as an element of civility in mid-eighteenth-century British culture.