Samuel Johnson's "general Nature"

Samuel Johnson's Author: Scott D. Evans
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 9780874136968
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
This study illuminates the importance and meaning of the term author in eighteenth-century discourse from the perspective of its prominent usage by Samuel Johnson. It explains Johnson's employment of nature in his periodical essays, his qualified endorsement of the new science, and his commendation of Shakespeare's drama and other literary works on the basis of their just representation of general nature.

Samuel Johnson's "general Nature"

Samuel Johnson's Author: Scott D. Evans
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 9780874136968
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 180

Get Book Here

Book Description
This study illuminates the importance and meaning of the term author in eighteenth-century discourse from the perspective of its prominent usage by Samuel Johnson. It explains Johnson's employment of nature in his periodical essays, his qualified endorsement of the new science, and his commendation of Shakespeare's drama and other literary works on the basis of their just representation of general nature.

The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Johnson

The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Johnson PDF Author: Jack Lynch
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198794665
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 705

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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.

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

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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 on Shakespeare

Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare PDF Author: Karl Young
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 98

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Book Description


Johnson's Milton

Johnson's Milton PDF Author: Christine Rees
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 113948592X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Samuel Johnson is often represented as primarily antagonistic or antipathetic to Milton. Yet his imaginative and intellectual engagement with Milton's life and writing extended across the entire span of his own varied writing career. As essayist, poet, lexicographer, critic and biographer - above all as reader - Johnson developed a controversial, fascinating and productive literary relationship with his powerful predecessor. To understand how Johnson creatively appropriates Milton's texts, how he critically challenges yet also confirms Milton's status, and how he constructs him as a biographical subject, is to deepen the modern reader's understanding of both writers in the context of historical continuity and change. Christine Rees's insightful study will be of interest not only to Milton and Johnson specialists, but to all scholars of early modern literary history and biography.

Johnson, Writing, and Memory

Johnson, Writing, and Memory PDF Author: Greg Clingham
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521816114
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
Examines Johnson's writing in relation to eighteenth-century thought on literature, history, fiction and law.

Johnson's Critical Presence

Johnson's Critical Presence PDF Author: Philip Smallwood
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1351924923
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
Johnson's Critical Presence demonstrates how Johnson's criticism has for long been divided from the issues of modern criticism by historical narratives that have marked the progress of criticism from 'classic to romantic'. The image of Johnson constructed by his immediate antagonists has been preserved by the routines of historical representation, and mediated to the present day, most recently, by the characterizations of 'radical theory'. By an in-depth analysis of major works by Johnson, Smallwood argues that the historicization of eighteenth-century criticism can be more fruitfully understood in the light of the 'dialogic' and 'translational' historiography of such thinkers as Collingwood and Ricoeur, and that the contexts of Johnson's criticism must include the poetry he read as well as the theories he espoused. In this way the book reinstates Johnson's 'presence' as critic while displacing the 'history of ideas' as the leading paradigm for conceptualizing the history of criticism.

The Testimony of Sense

The Testimony of Sense PDF Author: Tim Milnes
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198812736
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
This book offers a new account of the relationship between empiricism and the essay in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Exploring topics such as trust, testimony, virtue, and language, it offers new perspectives on connections between philosophy and literature, empiricism and transcendentalism, and Enlightenment and Romanticism.

“If Then the World a Theatre Present...“

“If Then the World a Theatre Present...“ PDF Author: Björn Quiring
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110383675
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
To metaphorize the world as a theatre has been a common procedure since antiquity, but the use of this trope became particularly prominent and pregnant in early modern times, especially in England. Old and new applications of the “theatrum mundi” topos pervaded discourses, often allegorizing the deceitfulness and impermanence of this world as well as the futility of earthly strife. It was frequently woven into arguments against worldly amusements such as the stage: Commercial theatre was declared an undesirable competitor of God’s well-ordered world drama. Early modern dramatists often reacted to this development by appropriating the metaphor, and in an ingenious twist, some playwrights even appropriated its anti-theatrical impetus: Early modern theatre seemed to discover a denial of its own theatricality at its very core. Drama was found to succeed best when it staged itself as a great unmasking. To investigate the reasons and effects of these developments, the anthology examines the metaphorical uses of theatre in plays, pamphlets, epics, treatises, legal proclamations and other sources.

There’s Thrift in Heaven

There’s Thrift in Heaven PDF Author: Elizabeth Coons
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 1663212430
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 48

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Book Description
To be fully free, we must make informed choices at the level of framing as we sift imagery into experience. The deeply figurative nature of poetry allows us to compare alternative framings in an abundance that is unavailable in declarative speech, where lines of reference are exclusive. . In addition, in imitating our own mind's movements, poetry lets us start to name them, thereby expanding the reach of comparison and choice within. This book looks at the relation among freedom, poetry, and informed choice. It also explores how poetry can endure through the depth and abundance of its framing demonstrations. Poetry can • Demonstrate framing processes that, by reordering, reveal long-hidden features and extend our visible domain. • Build the comparative skills that increase choice across domains • Reflect and trace our current framing processes • Fortify us against manipulative influence