Description
Book SynopsisBoswell and the Press: Essays on the Ephemeral Writing of James Boswell is the first sustained examination of James Boswell’s ephemeral writing, his contributions to periodicals, his pamphlets, and his broadsides. The essays collected here enhance our comprehension of his interests, capabilities, and proclivities as an author and refine our understanding of how the print environment in which he worked influenced what he wrote and how he wrote it. This book will also be of interest to historians of journalism and the publishing industry of eighteenth-century Britain.
Trade Review"
Boswell and the Press is a powerful, intellectually stimulating, and persuasively written book, offering a range of compelling and often luminous chapters by authors expert in Boswellian studies. The book breaks new ground in surveying a large corpus—for example,
The Cub, at New-market; A Letter to the People of Scotland; An Account of Corsica—and finds fresh things to say about an author who most of us thought we knew as well as the back of our hand.” -- Anthony Lee * editor of Community and Solitude: New Essays on Johnson's Circle *
“This groundbreaking volume of new essays on James Boswell is of unusually high quality: the essays are individually eloquent and informative, and as a whole the volume opens up Boswell to new approaches with new information. If you thought that James Boswell was old hat,
Boswell and the Press will have you rethinking the career of Johnson’s biographer.” -- George Justice * author of The Manufacturers of Literature: Writing and the Literary Marketplace in Eighteenth-Centur *
"Among the best of those essays is Newman’s introductory overview of Boswell’s ephemera, which largely avoids the necessary evil of such introductions, namely, a brisk trot through all the following essays in an attempt to illustrate, or create, a unity in the collection. A mere three of the 29 pages are so employed, with the balance providing an excellent summary of the role that producing journalism played throughout the author’s life." * Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer *
Table of Contents1. Boswell’s Ephemeral Writing: An Overview
Donald J. Newman
2. Anonymity and the Press: The Case of Boswell
Paul Tankard
3. James Boswell’s Design for a Scottish Periodical in the Scots Language: The Importance of His Prospectus for the
Sutiman Papers (ca. 1770?)
James J. Caudle
4. Boswell in Broadside
Terry Seymour
5.
An Elegy on the Death of an Amiable Young Lady: Serious Effort or Elaborate Joke?
Donald J. Newman
6. "Making the Press my Amanuensis": Male Friendship and Publicity in
The Cub, at New-market Celia Barnes
7.
The Hypochondriack and Its Context: James Boswell, 1777–1783
Allan Ingram
8. The Embodied Mind of Boswell’s
The Hypochondriack and the Turn-of-the-Century Novel
Jennifer Preston Wilson
9. Principle, Polemic, and Ambition: Boswell’s
A Letter to the People of Scotland and the End of the Fox-North Coalition, 1783
Nigel Aston
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index
