Abyssinia's Samuel Johnson

Abyssinia's Samuel Johnson PDF Author: Wendy Laura Belcher
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019979331X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
Uncovers African influences on the Western imagination during the eighteenth century, paying particular attention to the ways Ethiopia inspired and shaped the work of Samuel Johnson.

Abyssinia's Samuel Johnson

Abyssinia's Samuel Johnson PDF Author: Wendy Laura Belcher
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019979331X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
Uncovers African influences on the Western imagination during the eighteenth century, paying particular attention to the ways Ethiopia inspired and shaped the work of Samuel Johnson.

The Making of Dr. Johnson

The Making of Dr. Johnson PDF Author: John Wiltshire
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Examines the process by which Samuel Johnson the man became 'Dr Johnson', the lexicographer whose reputation for scholarship, robustness and wit is inseparable.

Boswell's Presumptuous Task

Boswell's Presumptuous Task PDF Author: Adam Sisman
Publisher: HarperPerennial
ISBN: 9780007234295
Category : Authors, Scottish
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
With great wit, Sisman here tells the story of Boswell's presumptuous task--the making of the greatest biography of all time. Sisman traces the friendship between Boswell and Samuel Johnson, his mentor, and provides a fascinating account of Boswell's seven-year struggle to write "The Life of Samuel Johnson."

Samuel Johnson

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

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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

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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.

Defining the World

Defining the World PDF Author: Henry Hitchings
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1429928948
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
By the early eighteenth century, France and Italy had impressive lexicons, but there was no authoritative dictionary of English. Sensing the deficit, and impelled by a mixture of national pride and commercial expedience, the prodigious polymath Samuel Johnson embraced the task, turning over the garret of his London home to the creation of his own giant dictionary. Johnson imagined that he could complete the job in three years. But the complexity of English meant that his estimate was wildly inadequate. Only after he had expended nearly a decade of his prime on the task did the dictionary finally appear - magisterial yet quirky, dogmatic but generous of spirit, and steeped in the richness of English literature. It would come to be seen as the most important British cultural monument of the eighteenth century, and its influence fanned out across Europe and throughout Britain's colonies - including, crucially, America. Brilliantly entertaining and enlightening, Defining the World is the story of Johnson's heroic endeavor, 250 years after the first publication of the Dictionary. In alphabetically sequenced chapters, Henry Hitchings describes Johnson's adventure - his ambition and vision, his moments of despair, the mistakes he made along the way, and his ultimate triumph.

Loving Dr. Johnson

Loving Dr. Johnson PDF Author: Helen Deutsch
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226143821
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
"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."--BOOK JACKET.

Samuel Johnson

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

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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.

Boswell's Presumptuous Task

Boswell's Presumptuous Task PDF Author: Adam Sisman
Publisher: Penguin Group
ISBN: 9780142001752
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
James Boswell's "The Life of Samuel Johnson" is the most celebrated of all biographies, acknowledged as one of the greatest and most entertaining books in the English language. Yet Boswell himself has generally been considered little more than an idiot and condemned by posterity as a lecher and drunk. How could such a fool have written such a book? With great wit, Adam Sisman here tells the story of Boswell's presumptuous task-the making of the greatest biography of all time. Sisman traces the friendship between Boswell and Samuel Johnson, his great mentor, and provides a fascinating account of Boswell's seven-year struggle to write "The Life of Samuel Johnson."

A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson

A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson PDF Author: H.P. Lovecraft
Publisher: Strelbytskyy Multimedia Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 8

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Book Description
"A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson" is a short story written in 1917 by American horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft. It was first published in the September 1917 issue of the United Amateur, under the pseudonym Humphrey Littlewit, Esq. The story is a spoof of Lovecraft's antiquarian affectations. Littlewit, the narrator, is born August 20, 1690–200 years to the day before Lovecraft's birthdate—making him nearly 228 years old as he writes a memoir. Critic Daniel Harms writes, "While not one of the most inspired of his pieces, it at least shows that HPL realized his pretensions... of being an older, cultured gentleman of an earlier era, and could make fun of himself."