Description
Book SynopsisThe move to a new publisher has given The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual the opportunity to recommit to what it does best: present to a wide readership cant-free scholarly articles and essays and searching book reviews, all featuring a wide variety of approaches, written by both seasoned scholars and relative newcomers. Volume 24 features commentary on a range of Johnsonian topics: his reaction to Milton, his relation to the Allen family, his notes in his edition of Shakespeare, his use of Oliver Goldsmith in his Dictionary, and his always fascinating Nachleben. The volume also includes articles on topics of strong interest to Johnson: penal reform, Charlotte Lennox's professional literary career, and the "conjectural history" of Homer in the eighteenth century.
For more than two decades, The Age of Johnson has presented a vast corpus of Johnsonian studies "in the broadest sense," as founding editor Paul J. Korshin put it in the preface to Volume 1, and it has retained the interest of a wide readership. In thousands of pages of articles, review essays, and reviews, The Age of Johnson has made a permanent contribution to our understanding of the eighteenth century, and particularly of Samuel Johnson, his circle, and his interests, and has also served as an outlet for writers who are not academics but have something important to say about the eighteenth century.
ISSN 0884-5816.
Trade Review"Dedicated to publishing the best scholarship on Johnson and the long eighteenth century,
The Age of Johnson has carved out a unique place for itself. The unusual amount of space allowed enables contributors to address in depth every facet of Johnson’s work and life from his prayers to his politics (while not ignoring the wider aspects of the age) and the extensive review articles consistently engage with their subject matter at a level which is not possible elsewhere." -- Michael Bundock * author of The Fortunes of Francis Barber: The True Story of the Jamaican Slave Who Became Samuel Joh *
"The era that included Johnson and the epoch that Johnson defined: Both versions of
The Age of Johnson merge, mingle, and happily marry in the long-awaited revival of Jack Lynch’s and John Scanlan’s acclaimed journal. Much as 'Dr. Johnson' refracts human experience through the zoom lens of biography, so this first volume from Bucknell University Press peers at the glorious spectrum of eighteenth-century culture through prismatic particularities. Readers of
The Age of Johnson will watch with joy and amazement as able authors extract vibrant insights from such gems in the Enlightenment lode as Johnson’s notes to Shakespeare or Hester Piozzi’s verse annotations or even a few dusty portraits of John Milton hanging in a corner of 'the Great Cham’s' powder room. Past, present, singular, and universal converge in inventive studies of Johnson’s place on twentieth-century reading lists, of penal reform, and of Enlightenment notions concerning the identity of epic poet Homer. Johnson recommends that learners scan the world from China to Peru—from Lima to Lisbon and on to Beijing—but Johnson is here outdone by a truly global journal that even includes comments on Pacific explorer James Cook. Energized by snappy reviews and enriched by diligently full-length review essays, the newly upgraded
Age of Johnson delivers lively, precise, and, above all, pioneering scholarship. It brings out the best in that select cadre of writers, thinkers, and occasionally even landscapers who, year after year and century after century, refresh and redefine the English Enlightenment." -- Kevin L. Cope * editor of 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era *
"
AJ has been missing from the academic scene for far too long. Here’s to our earnest hope and expectation that the hiatus of the past years is now permanently bridged, and that we may expect from editors Lynch and Scanlan, their publishers, and their future contributors, the thorough, steady, and stable emission of volumes on a regular and timely basis, one volume per year. Johnsonians deserve nothing less, nor does Johnson. AJ, welcome back. It’s good to see you again." * 18th Century Intelligencer *
Table of ContentsPreface
Essays Milton at Bolt Court
Stephen Clarke Mimesis and Understanding in Samuel Johnson’s Notes to Shakespeare (1765)
Marcus Walsh Samuel Johnson and the Allen Family
Matthew M. Davis “Con Amore”: Hester Piozzi’s Annotations upon Johnson’s Early Poetry
Anthony W. Lee Johnson (and Boswell) in the Lists: A View of Their Reputations, 1933–2018
Paul Tankard The Curious Case of Charlotte Lennox: Conducting a Professional Literary Life in Eighteenth-Century Britain outside the Bluestocking Circle
Susan Kubica Howard Punitive Injustice in
Caleb Williams: Godwin’s Vexed Call for Penal Reform
Suzanna Geiser Sensibility Reclaimed: Thomas Blackwell, Robert Wood, and the “Conjectural History” of Homer
Peter M. BriggsReview Essays Organizing a Life and the “Lives”: Samuel Johnson and the Yale Edition of Johnson’s
Lives of the Poets David Venturo Is Historical Fiction Still Revolutionary?
Eric BennettReviews Michael Schmidt,
The Novel: A Biography John Richetti David Alff,
The Wreckage of Intentions: Projects in British Culture, 1660–1730Jacob Sider Jost Aileen Douglas,
Work in Hand: Script, Print, and Writing, 1690–1840Robert DeMaria Jr. Julie Flavell,
When London Was Capital of AmericaJoseph F. Bartolomeo John Phibbs,
Place-Making: The Art of Capability Brown Heinz-Joachim Müllenbrock Notes on Contributors
