Search results for ""author samuel johnson""

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

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'What then is to be done? said Rasselas; the more we inquire, the less we can resolve.' Rasselas and his companions escape the pleasures of the 'happy valley' in order to make their 'choice of life'. By witnessing the misfortunes and miseries of others they may come to understand the nature of happiness, and value it more highly. Their travels and enquiries raise important practical and philosophical questions concerning many aspects of the human condition, including the business of a poet, the stability of reason, the immortality of the soul, and how to find contentment. Johnson's adaptation of the popular oriental tale displays his usual wit and perceptiveness; sceptical and probing, his tale nevertheless suggests that wisdom and self-knowledge need not be entirely beyond reach. This new edition relates the novel to Johnson's life and thought and to politics, society, and the global context of the Seven Years War. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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The surviving sermons of Samuel Johnson, presented in a scholarly edition for the first time It has been known since the publication of pre-Boswellian biographies that Samuel Johnson wrote sermons that were preached by others. The twenty-eight that have survived are presented here in their first scholarly edition, with full explanations and textual notes. They include a hitherto unpublished manuscript sermon and the celebrated Convict’s Address to His Unhappy Brethren, written for the notorious forger Dr. William Dodd for delivery to his fellow prisoners on the eve of his execution at Newgate. In the sermons one finds the famous Johnsonian rhetoric and logic applied to such subjects as marriage and friendship, the meaning of moral and physical evil, the need to adjust punishment so that it fits the crime, and the desirability of tradition in religion. Equally eloquent are Johnson’s indignant and fiery attacks on intellectual pride, “the vanity of human wishes,” perjury, defamation, fraud, skepticism, and infidelity. In their introduction, the editors discuss the circumstances surrounding the composition, preaching, and publication of the sermons. Certain to interest students of Johnson’s thought, this volume should also appeal to those concerned with the development of English style and with the venerable and once admired English homiletical tradition.

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Samuel Johnson's Dictionary, published in 1755, marked a milestone in a language in desperate need of standards. No English dictionary before it had devoted so much space to everyday words, been so thorough in its definitions, or illustrated usage by quoting from Shakespeare and other great writers. Johnson's was the dictionary used by Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, Wordsworth and Coleridge, the Brontës and the Brownings, Thomas Hardy and Oscar Wilde. This new edition, edited by David Crystal, will contain a selection from the original, offering memorable passages on subjects ranging from books and critics to dreams and ethics.

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If you could tell your dad anything, what would it be? Steve Waugh, Trent Dalton, Samuel Johnson, Kathy Lette, John Williamson, Susie Youssef, Michala Banas, Glenn Shorrock, Matilda Brown, Joel Creasey, Shannon Noll, Michelle Law, Ben Gillies, Hilde Hinton, Normie Rowe, Mark Brandi, Brian Mannix, Julie Koh, Sara Storer, Russell Morris, Catherine Deveny, Sophie Green, Brooke Davis, Toni Tapp Coutts, Clare Wright, Danny Green, John Paul Young, Kurt Fearnley and many more ...A heartfelt, honest and very human book of letters that will make you smile and make you cry. It is the perfect gift for the dad in your life. And a reminder to say how you feel before it is too late.

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When James Boswell persuaded Samuel Johnson to embark on a tour of Boswell’s native Scotland in 1773, the adventure resulted in two magnificent books, Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and Boswell’sJournal of a Tour to the Hebrides. Johnson offers a magisterial account of what was then a remote and rugged land, while Boswell throws further light on the friend and mentor whom he immortalized in his biography. Together, they make up a brilliant portrait of two very different and very remarkable men exploring a feudal world which was soon to pass away for ever.

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An anthology of the essential and enduring works of Samuel Johnson Samuel Johnson was eighteenth-century Britain’s preeminent man of letters—moral and literary critic, biographer, lexicographer, and poet—and his influence endures to this day. 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. It 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. The anthology is organized so that readers can focus on such topics as religion, marriage, war, and literature, and most texts are included in their entirety. The authors provide a biographical introduction and ample annotation to update and enlarge the commentary in the Yale Edition.

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When Samuel Johnson unicycled around Australia, he met some awesome people. And before we had to lock down, he and his other sister, Hilde, were travelling the country talking at schools, community groups and at the side of busy streets to spread their message about how to kick cancer in the face hole. But in the process they connected and listened as people shared their own stories - not just about how cancer impacted them, but about love, fighting fires, making families out of choice not blood, knitting, being there and being surprised by life and finding solace from strangers. They decided those stories should be shared and the idea for Heroes Next Door was born. The result is a moving, funny, irreverent, inspiring and big-hearted book that shows us all that resilience and kindness are what make the difference, and that you don't have to travel far to find good people ... often they are right next door.

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Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, leaves the easy life of the Happy Valley, accompanied by his sister Nekayah, her attendant Pekuah, and the much-travelled philosopher Imlac. Their journey takes them to Egypt, where they study the various conditions of men's lives, before returning home in a 'conclusion in which nothing is concluded'. Johnson's tale is not only a satire on optimism, but also an expression of truth about the human mind and its infinite capacity for hope.

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The Life of Mr Richard Savage was the first important book by a then-unknown Grub Street hack, Samuel Johnson. Richard Savage (1697—1743) was a poet, playwright, and satirist who claimed to be the illegitimate son of a late earl and to have been denied his inheritance and viciously persecuted by his mother. He was urbane, charming, a brilliant conversationalist, but also irresponsible and impulsive. His role in a tavern brawl almost led him to the gallows, though his life was saved by an eleventh-hour pardon by the King. Over time he attracted many supporters, practically all of whom he managed to alienate by the time of his death in a debtors’ prison in Bristol. Johnson, who had been friends with Savage for a little over a year, drew on published documents and his own memories of Savage to produce one of the first great English biographies.The edition is supplemented by other writings by Johnson, a selection of Savage’s prose and verse, contemporary and posthumous responses to Savage and to Johnson’s biography, and selections by Johnson’s first two major biographers, Sir John Hawkins and James Boswell.

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'If a man is to write A Panegyrick, he may keep vices out of sight; but if he professes to write A Life, he must represent it really as it was.' In the last of his major writings, Samuel Johnson looked back over the previous two centuries of English Literature in order to describe the personalities as well as the achievements of the leading English poets. The major Lives - of Milton, Dryden, Swift, and Pope - are memorable cameos of the life of writing in which Johnson is as attentive to human frailty as to literary prowess. The shorter Lives preserve some of Johnson's most piercing, critical judgements. Unsentimental, opinionated, and quotable, The Lives of the Poets continues to influence the reputations of the writers concerned. It is one of the greatest works of English criticism, but also one of the most humanly diverting. This selection of the Lives of ten of the most important poets draws its text from Roger Lonsdale's authoritative complete edition. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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In 1773, James Boswell made a long-planned journey across the Scottish Highlands with his English friend Samuel Johnson; the two spent more than a hundred days together. Their tour of the Hebrides resulted in two books, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), a kind of locodescriptive ethnography and Johnson's most important work between his Shakespeare edition and his Lives of the Poets. The other, Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson (1785), a travel narrative experimenting with biography, the first application of the techniques he would use in his Life of Samuel Johnson (1791). These two works form a natural pair and, owing that they cover much of the same material, are often read together, focusing on the Scottish highlands. The text presents a lightly-edited version of both works, preserving the original orthography and corrected typographical errors to fit modern grammar standards. The introduction and notes provide clear and concise explanations on Johnson and Boswell's respective careers, their friendship and grand biographical projects. It also examines the Scottish Enlightenment, the status of England and Scotland during the Reformation through to the Union of the Crowns, and the Jacobite

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Samuel Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and James Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides are widely regarded as among the best pieces of travel writing ever produced. Johnson and Boswell spent the autumn of 1773 touring Scotland as far west as the islands of Skye, Raasay, Coll, Mull, Ulva, Inchkenneth and Iona. Highly readable, often profound, and at times very funny, their accounts of the ‘jaunt’ are above all a valuable record of a society undergoing rapid change. In this pioneering new edition, Ronald Black brings together the two men’s starkly contrasting accounts of each of the thirteen stages of the journey. He also restores to Boswell’s text 20,000 words from his journal which were denied entry to his book because they were intimate, defamatory, or about the islands rather than Johnson. The endnotes incorporate Boswell’s footnotes, translations of Latin passages, a clear summary of pre-existing information on the two texts, and a fresh focus on what the two men actually found on their trip. To the Hebrides also includes contemporary prints by Thomas Rowlandson, seventeen new maps and a comprehensive index.

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New Essays on Samuel Johnson: Revaluation is a collection of essays by various hands that examines its point of focus, the inexhaustible English author Samuel Johnson, from a variety of different critical perspectives. The book also simultaneously interrogates particular texts (such as the Dictionary, the Lives of the Poets) alongside general themes (such as Johnson and intertextuality, Johnson and autobiography). The word “revaluation” from the title connotes both the deployment of specifically au courant approaches—viewing, for example, Johnson in relation to climate change, or Johnson and the notion of “osmology”—as well as more general reflections upon Johnson’s importance to our present cultural and temporal moment.

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Essential writings on the English language—its history, structure, and cultural importance—by one of its most adroit practitioners This volume of the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson collects the writer’s most important statements on the English language. It includes fully annotated editions of Johnson’s main writings on the history, structure, and cultural importance of English, as well as his reflections on lexicography. These texts represent Johnson’s thinking as he undertook and completed the major work of his life, the colossal Dictionary of the English Language. By setting Johnson’s writings on the English language in historical context, the editors provide the fullest possible account of their composition. Among the works presented in the volume are Johnson’s Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language andthe Preface to the Dictionary,both of which are counted among his finest works of prose.

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