Political Writings

Political Writings
Author: Samuel Johnson
Publisher: Yale Edition of the Works of S
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2000
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780865972759

The eighteenth century produced a remarkable array of thinkers whose influence in the development of free societies and free institutions is incalculable. Among these thinkers were Mandeville, Hutcheson, Smith, Hume, and Burke. And their time is known as the Age of Johnson. Samuel Johnson: Political Writings contains twenty-four of Johnson’s essays on the great social, economic, and political issues of his time. These include “Taxation No Tyranny”—in which Johnson defended the British Crown against the American revolutionaries—and “An Introduction to the Political State of Great Britain,” “Thoughts on the Coronation of King George III,” and “The Patriot,” which is one of Johnson’s principal writings during the American Revolution. In his introduction, Donald J. Greene writes, “it may help to understand [Johnson’s] political thinking if we view it in the tradition of what might be called ‘skeptical’ (or ‘radical’ or ‘empirical’) conservatism, the essential feature of which is distrust of grandiose a priori theory and dogma as the basis for political action.” The Liberty Fund edition is a paperback version of Volume 10 in The Yale Johnson.

Samuel Johnson and the Sense of History

Samuel Johnson and the Sense of History
Author: John A. Vance
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2009-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0820333778

No area of Johnsonian studies has been less appreciated and more misunderstood than Johnson's response to history. Popular notions to the effect that he was insensitive to history have discouraged scholars and critics from discovering the role history played in his thinking. In this first book-length investigation of the subject, John A. Vance concludes that few misconceptions about Samuel Johnson have been so glaring as his supposed dislike of history. More specifically, in separate chapters Vance examines the development of Johnson's historical sense--from his readings, heritage, and travels to historical sites; Johnson's recall and use of historical figures and events, most notably the seventeenth-century attitude toward the most maligned member of the historical family, antiquarianism. The author also devotes two chapters to Johnson's historical writings--that is, those works in which he either incorporates history into his critical, biographical, and political discussions or those in which he clearly assumes the role of historian himself. Vance furthermore considers Johnson's views on historical facts, educative and moral history, the broadening scope of historical investigation, the nature of historical truth and skepticism, historical research, historical causation, and the historian's style.

Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson
Author: Jeffrey Meyers
Publisher: Oldcastle Books Ltd
Total Pages: 543
Release: 2015-11-27
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1904915507

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.

The Politics of Samuel Johnson

The Politics of Samuel Johnson
Author: Donald Greene
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 442
Release: 2009-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0820333727

First published in 1960, The Politics of Samuel Johnson remains one of the most significant studies of Johnson ever written. Contrary to virtually all preceding studies of Johnson's life, politics, and art, Donald Greene declared that the popular image of Johnson--one that even pervaded academic circles--was a caricature, an amalgam of misconceptions, inaccuracies, and sometimes deliberate untruths drawn from the works of his well-intentioned friend Boswell and his detractor Macaulay.In the Introduction to the second edition, Greene reasserts--in light of three decades of Johnsonian scholarship--his attack on the stereotyping of Johnson as a bigoted, party-line Tory and a crypto-Jacobite. Utilizing new material such as Thomas Curley's edition of the Chambers/Johnson Vinerian law lectures and the sale catalogue to Johnson's library to support his argument, Greene also warns that Johnson is still misquoted and misunderstood in situations from classroom lectures to discussions of Britain's role in the 1982 Falklands War.

Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson
Author: Peter Martin
Publisher: Hachette UK
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2012-08-16
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0297856162

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.

Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson
Author: W. Jackson Bate
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2009-08-18
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1582435243

Samuel Johnson is a writer of such significance that his era — the second half of the 18th century — is known as the Age of Johnson. Starting out as a Grub Street journalist, he made his mark on history as a poet, author, moralist, literary critic, political commentator, and lexiconographer. We, as moderns, need to know this man, and W. Jackson Bate's formidable biography, with its uncanny depth and empathy, is the book that makes that happen. Professor W. Jackson Bate is a lyrical writer who deftly explains the effect Johnson has had on scholars, critics, and readers of all kinds through the past 200 years: "The reason Johnson has always fascinated so many people of different kinds," Bate writes, "is not simply that [he] is so vividly picturesque and quotable . . . The deeper secret of his hypnotic attraction, especially during our own generation, lies in the immense reassurance he gives to human nature." Bate delves deep into the character that formed Johnson's intellect and fueled his prodigious contribution to literature, religion, politics, and our understanding of the nature of humankind, revealing the fascinating nature — both odd and adored — of this literary luminary.

Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson
Author: Samuel Johnson
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 853
Release: 2021-01-05
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0300258003

A one-volume collection of the prose and poetry of eighteenth-century Britain’s pre-eminent lexicographer, critic, biographer, and poet Samuel Johnson Samuel Johnson was eighteenth-century Britain’s preeminent man of letters, and his influence endures to this day. He excelled as a moral and literary critic, biographer, lexicographer, and poet. This anthology, designed to make Johnson’s essential works accessible to students and general readers, draws its texts from the definitive Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. In most cases, texts are included in full rather than excerpted. The anthology includes many essays from The Rambler and other periodicals; Rasselas; the prefaces to Johnson’s Dictionary and his edition of Shakespeare; the complete Lives of Cowley, Milton, Pope, Savage, and Gray, as well as generous selections from A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. Some parts are arranged thematically, allowing readers to focus on such topics as religion, marriage, war, and literature. The anthology includes a biographical introduction, and its ample annotation updates and enlarges the commentary in the Yale Edition.

Abyssinia's Samuel Johnson

Abyssinia's Samuel Johnson
Author: Wendy Laura Belcher
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2012-06-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 019979331X

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 Club

The Club
Author: Leo Damrosch
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 498
Release: 2019-03-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0300244967

Prize-winning biographer Leo Damrosch tells the story of “the Club,” a group of extraordinary writers, artists, and thinkers who gathered weekly at a London tavern In 1763, the painter Joshua Reynolds proposed to his friend Samuel Johnson that they invite a few friends to join them every Friday at the Turk’s Head Tavern in London to dine, drink, and talk until midnight. Eventually the group came to include among its members Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, and James Boswell. It was known simply as “the Club.” In this captivating book, Leo Damrosch brings alive a brilliant, competitive, and eccentric cast of characters. With the friendship of the “odd couple” Samuel Johnson and James Boswell at the heart of his narrative, Damrosch conjures up the precarious, exciting, and often brutal world of late eighteenth-century Britain. This is the story of an extraordinary group of people whose ideas helped to shape their age, and our own.