Search results for ""Author Samuel Johnson"

This book explores contemporary anxieties over language and genre in Johnson's literature.

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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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Johnson, born weak and half-blind, shambolic and poverty-stricken, became the most admired and quoted man in the eighteenth century. Thrown out of Oxford for a lack of funds, he rose to celebrity: author of the Dictionary, a friend to the king, companion of Reynolds, Goldsmith and Garrick.David Nokes looks beyond Johnson's remarkable public persona and beyond the Johnson that Boswell to some extent created. Nokes looks at his troubled relationship with his first wife, whom he married for money but felt guilty about for the rest of his life; at his family, who haunted his dreams for years; and at his difficult, intimate relationship with Mrs Thrale. He shows a man who gave a quarter of the government pension he received to the poor, filled his home with the blind and destitute, and bequeathed his wealth to Frank Barber, an emancipated black slave brought from Jamaica. Insightful and engaging, Samuel Johnson draws an illuminating portrait of Johnson, his life and world.

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In this book, Martin Wechselblatt explores Samuel Johnson's double professional self-construction as alternately Augustan sage and Grub Street hack: as the exemplary "Dr. Johnson" and as one of the many "authors to let" brought to life and just as suddenly extinguished by mass-market publishing. Unlike previous studies of Johnson and print culture, however, Bad Behavior is concerned with the reasons so many readers and critics of Johnson have been led to regularly subsume into the monumental precedent of Johnson the sage, the material conditions of modern authority expressed by self-reflections of Johnson the hack. Situating Johnson within a historical and sociological model of modernity adapted from critical theory, Dr. Wechselblatt argues that Johnson's double self-construction as at once high-cultural sage and popular hack dramatizes tensions between learned and commercial cultures in the emerging public sphere of contemporary civil society. As Johnson was acutely aware, the great paradox of cultural criticism is that it depends for its authority on the very culture it criticizes. For this reason, it is particularly useful to read Johnson through his critics - to reconfigure, from the directions criticism has taken, criticism's own conditions of possibility. In a version of what Horkheimer and Adorno characterize as modernity's epistemological closure and its ritual transformation of the "unknown" into "the well-known of an equation," Bad Behavior investigates the critical reduction of Johnson's discourse to its maxims, and the relation of this critical practice to the peculiary modern identification felt by fans toward celebrities. Dr. Wechselblatt finds that Johnson authority reproduces the tension between, on one hand, a stable, delegated form of knowledge, which Johnson associated with the patronage system and with Locke's temporal duration; and on the other, the mere succession of authorities characteristic of experience in the marketplace.

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The most celebrated English biography is a group portrait in which extraordinary man paints the picture of a dozen moreAt the centre of a brilliant circle which included Burke, Reynolds, Garrick, Fanny Burney and even George III, Boswell captures the powerful, troubled and witty figure of Samuel Johnson, who towers above them all. Yet this is also an intimate picture of domestic life, which mingles the greatest talkers of a talkative age with the hero's humbler friends in a picture which is, before all things, humane.As a young man about London, James Boswell was obsessed by literature, and, on a fateful day in 1763, he attached himself with unswerving tenacity to the dominant literary figure of his age—the splendidly rotund, articulate, and humane Dr Samuel Johnson. What followed was the most famous of friendships between writers and the bais for the remarkable documentation contained in Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, the greatest and most com

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In Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, one of the towering figures of English literature is revealed with unparalleled immediacy and originality, in a biography to which we owe much of our knowledge of the man himself. Through a series of richly detailed anecdotes, Johnson emerges as a sociable figure, vigorously engaging and fencing with great contemporaries such as Garrick, Goldsmith, Burney and Burke, and of course with Boswell himself. Yet anxieties and obsessions also darkened Johnson's private hours, and Boswell's attentiveness to every facet of Johnson's character makes this biography as moving as it is entertaining.In this entirely new and unabridged edition, David Womersley's introduction examines the motives behind Boswell's work, and the differences between the two men that drew them to each other. It also contains chronologies of Boswell and Johnson, appendices and comprehensive indexes, including biographical details.

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If readers of the twentieth century feel overwhelmed by the proliferation of writing and information, they can find in Samuel Johnson a sympathetic companion. Johnson's career coincided with the rapid expansion of publishing in England-not only in English, but in Latin and Greek; not only in books, but in reviews, journals, broadsides, pamphlets, and books about books. In 1753 Johnson imagined a time when "writers will, perhaps, be multiplied, till no readers will be found." Three years later, he wrote that England had become "a nation of authors" in which "every man must be content to read his book to himself." In Samuel Johnson and the Life of Reading, Robert DeMaria considers the surprising influence of one of the greatest readers in English literature. Johnson's relationship to books not only reveals much about his life and times, DeMaria contends, but also provides a dramatic counterpoint to modern reading habits. As a superior practitioner of the craft, Johnson provides a compelling model for how to read-indeed, he provides different models for different kinds of reading. DeMaria shows how Johnson recognized early that not all reading was alike-some requiring intense concentration, some suited for cursory glances, some requiring silence, some best appreciated amid the chatter of a coffeehouse. Considering the remarkable range of Johnson's reading, DeMaria discovers in one extraordinary career a synoptic view of the subject of reading.

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Paul Kent Alkon’s Samuel Johnson and Moral Discipline provides reading of Johnson that emphasizes his moral discourse. Shortly after its publication, Alkon’s book became first of all the standard reading of Johnson’s essays, contrasting them with the moral ideas Johnson discussed in his sermons, as moral writings, and second, as one of the first books on Johnson to explore the essayist’s focus on moral thinking as central to his writing.

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The most celebrated English biography is a group portrait in which extraordinary man paints the picture of a dozen more. At the centre of a brilliant circle which included Burke, Reynolds, Garrick, Fanny Burney and even George III, Boswell captures the powerful, troubled and witty figure of Samuel Johnson, who towers above them all. Yet this is also an intimate picture of domestic life, which mingles the greatest talkers of a talkative age with the hero's humbler friends in a picture which is, before all things, humane. This is a new, corrected, rest and reprinted edition. At 14. 99 for the complete edition of the Life in 1344 pages, it compares with Penguin's abridged edition of just 300 pages of text at 6. 99 and OUP's World Classics unabridged edition printed on newsprint at 10. 99.

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This edition of Johnson's Latin Poems contains a Preface and Introduction followed by text, translation (prose), and brief notes on the poems. Several corrections have been made to the standard text. The notes deal with the obscurities and provide comment on style and treatment. It is often interesting to see how Johnson uses his Latin sources, especially Horace, to add a dimension to his meaning. There are numerous links with familiar episodes in Johnson's life, e.g., his trip to the Hebrides, the revision of his dictionary, his recovery from illness; and there are instances (notable in the anguished appeals for mercy in his prayers), where the more distant Latin form enables Johnson to say things about himself that he would never have expressed in English. The reader will find new details added to the well-loved portrait.

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The description for this book, Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print: (Originally published as Printing Technology, Letters, and Samuel Johnson), will be forthcoming.

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With the urbanization of eighteenth-century English society, moral philosophers became preoccupied with the difference between individual and crowd behavior. In so doing, they set the stage for a form of political thought divorced from traditional moral reflection. In Regulating Confusion Thomas Reinert places Samuel Johnson in the context of this development and investigates Johnson’s relation to an emerging modernity.Ambivalent about the disruption, confusion, perplexity, and boundless variety apparent in the London of his day, Johnson was committed to the conventions of moral reflection but also troubled by the pressure to adopt the perspective of the crowd and the language of social theory. Regulating Confusion explores the consequences of his ambivalence and his attempt to order the chaos. It discusses his critique of moral generalizations, concept of moral reflection as a symbolic gesture, and account of what happens to the notion of character when individuals, having lost the support of moral convention, become faces in a crowd. Reflecting generally on the relationship between skepticism and political ideology, Reinert also discusses Johnson’s political skepticism and the forms of speculation and action it authorized. Challenging prevalent psychologizing and humanistic interpretations, Regulating Confusion leaves behind the re-emergent view of Johnson as a reactionary ideologue and presents him in a theoretically sophisticated context. It offers his style of skepticism as a model of poise in the face of confusion about the nature of political truth and personal responsibility and demonstrates his value as a resource for students of culture struggling with contemporary debates about the relationship between literature and politics.

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Tragedy in the eighteenth century is often said to have expired or been deflected into nondramatic forms like history and satire, and to have survived mainly as a "tragic sense" in writers like Samuel Johnson. Leopold Damrosch shows that many readers were still capable of an imaginative response to tragedy. In Johnson, however, moral and aesthetic assumptions limited his ability to appreciate or create tragedy, despite a deep understanding of human suffering. This limitation, Mr. Damrosch argues, derived partly from his Christian belief, and more largely from a view of reality that did not allow exclusive focus on its tragic aspects. The author discusses Irene, The vanity of Human Wishes, and Johnson's criticism of tragedy, particularly that of Shakespeare. A Final chapter places Johnson's view in the context of modern theories. Originally published in 1972. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

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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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A strange novel for strange young people.Young Samuel Johnson and his dachshund Boswell are trying to show initiative by trick-or-treating a full three days before Hallowe'en. Which is how they come to witness strange goings-on at 666 Crowley Avenue. The Abernathys don't mean any harm by their flirtation with Satanism. But it just happens to coincide with a malfunction in the Large Hadron Collider that creates a gap in the universe. A gap in which there is a pair of enormous gates. The gates to Hell. And there are some pretty terrifying beings just itching to get out . . .Can Samuel persuade anyone to take this seriously? Can he harness the power of science to save the world as we know it?

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Samuel Johnson - with a little help from his dachshund Boswell and a very unlucky demon named Nurd - has sent the demons back to Hell. But the diabolical Mrs Abernathy is not one to take defeat lying down.When she reopens the portal and sucks Samuel and Boswell down into the underworld, she brings an ice-cream van full of dwarfs as well. And two policemen. Can this eccentric gang defeat the forces of Evil? And is there life after Hell for Nurd?

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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 is not in a happy place. He is dating the wrong girl, demons are occupying his spare room, and the town in which he lives appears to be cursed.But there is some good news on the horizon. After years of neglect, the grand old building that once housed Wreckit & Sons is about to reopen as the greatest toyshop that Biddlecombe has ever seen, and Samuel and his faithful dachshund Boswell are to be guests of honour at the big event. A splendid time will be had by all, as long as they can ignore the sinister statue that keeps moving around the town, the Shadows that are slowly blocking out the stars, the murderous Christmas elves, and the fact that somewhere in Biddlecombe a rotten black heart is beating a rhythm of revenge.A trap has been set. The Earth is doomed. The last hope for humanity lies with one young boy and the girl who's secretly in love with him. Oh, and a dog, two demons, four dwarfs and a very polite monster.

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Winner of the 2015 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-FictionShortlisted for the Wellcome Book PrizeA Sunday Times and New York Times bestsellerForeword by Oliver SacksWhat is autism: a devastating developmental condition, a lifelong disability, or a naturally occurring form of cognitive difference akin to certain forms of genius? In truth, it is all of these things and more - and the future of our society depends on our understanding it. Following on from his groundbreaking article 'The Geek Syndrome', Wired reporter Steve Silberman unearths the secret history of autism, long suppressed by the same clinicians who became famous for discovering it, and finds surprising answers to the crucial question of why the number of diagnoses has soared in recent years.Going back to the earliest autism research and chronicling the brave and lonely journey of autistic people and their families through the decades, Silberman provides long-sought solutions to the autism puzzle while casting light on the growing movement of 'neurodiversity' and mapping out a path towards a more humane world for people with learning differences.

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Bursting with imagination and impossible to put down, these novels - 'darkly comic' (Telegraph) and 'delightfully horrific and hilarious' (Eoin Colfer) - from The Sunday Times bestselling author John Connolly, are about the pull between good and evil, physics and fantasy - and a quirky boy, who is impossible not to love, and the unlikely cast of characters who give him the strength to stand up to a demonic power.The Gates: Samuel Johnson's neighbour Mrs Abernathy is trying to open the gates of hell. It's up to Samuel to stop her, except nobody will believe him, and time is running out.The Infernals (prev. Hell's Bells): Samuel and Boswell are pulled through a portal into Hell. But Mrs Abernathy has reckoned without their bravery and cleverness, or the loyalty of Samuel's friend, the demon Nurd, and Mr Merryweather's Elves.The Creeps: Samuel and Boswell are to be guests of honour at the opening of the greatest toyshop. A splendid time will be had by all, as long as they can ignore the sinister statue that keeps moving around the town, the Shadows that are slowly blocking out the stars, murderous elves, and the fact that, somewhere, a rotten black heart is beating a rhythm of revenge.

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Howard D. Weinbrot's Aspects of Samuel Johnson: Essays on His Arts, Mind, Afterlife, and Politics collects earlier and new essays on Johnson's varied achievements in lexicography, poetry, narrative, and prose style. It considers Johnson's uses of the general and the particular as they relate to the reader's role in the creative process, his complex approach to the concept of literary genre, and his resolutely un-Humean view of skepticism. It examines the ways in which Johnson's reputation as a critic and biographer was challenged and affirmed after his death, and it demonstrates that Johnson was known and admired in eighteenth-century France until Boswell's portrait of Mr. Oddity replaced Dictionary Johnson. The book concludes with four essays concerning the vexed controversy regarding Johnson and Jacobitism and Johnson's political affiliation in Hanoverian Britain. Aspects of Samuel Johnson consolidates old ground and breaks new ground during the 250th anniversary of the appearance of his Dictionary of the English Language.

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This book describes how eighteenth-century awareness of the interplay between fixity and instability in printed texts demonstrates the role print played in developing Samuel Johnson's awareness of print culture's impact on human beings ethically, politically, and aesthetically. The study traces the evolution and continuity of Johnson's ideas in these areas by describing the importance of print mediation for Johnson's approach to solving related epistemological and ethical dilemmas facing his generation from the Restoration to the late eighteenth century. Print, Chaos, and Complexity shows how Johnson's non-fiction prose allows him to suggest that categories of truth and virtue may be stabilized when the orderly disorder of texts is properly conceptualized and used to inform the theory and practice of mimesis. Thus Johnson helps shape ideas on mediation, epistemology, ethics, and politics in the Age of Johnson in Great Britain (1755-84).

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Originally published in 1967. Professor Sachs shows the inner coherence of Samuel Johnson's thought by pointing out the interconnectedness of his remarks on religious, moral, aesthetic, political, and psychological subjects. Reason and imagination, the central concepts in the Johnsonian ethos, are elucidated with reference to "vacuity," "attention," "novelty," "diversity," and other words to which Johnson attached special significance. Johnson emerges as an original thinker of the English Christian-humanist heritage; he "is to be read in the same spirit as Pascal." Primarily concerned with the relation between Johnson's ideas and the long tradition of which they are the culmination, Sachs also emphasizes the relevance of Johnson's thought to the twentieth century.

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From the eighteenth century to the present, travellers, explorers, journalists, imaginative writers like Samuel Johnson, and legendary reggae musician Bob Marley have shared a fascination with Abyssinia. So did even earlier writers and mapmakers, who thought Abyssinia was the land of the mythical (and fabulously rich) Christian ruler, Prester John. The principal subject of this book is the allure of the exotic, as represented by Abyssinia, to the British imagination. In addition to Johnson and Marley, some others included are the eighteenth-century Scot James Bruce, nineteenth-century explorer Richard Burton, author Evelyn Waugh, Wilfred Thesiger (best known of twentieth-century British explorers), Sylvia Pankhurst (crusading journalist and daughter of the suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst), and the contemporary Irish traveller Dervla Murphy. The author also considers the beginnings of anthropology and the variations of quest narrative in modern travel writing.

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To commemorate the tercentenary of the birth of Samuel Johnson (1709–1784), whose influence on his time was as monumental as his legacy is enduring, Harvard University’s Houghton Library presents this exhibition catalogue of items drawn from the Donald & Mary Hyde Collection of Dr. Samuel Johnson, bequeathed to the library in 2004 by Mary Hyde Eccles. This copiously illustrated catalogue documents sixty years of assiduous and painstaking effort on the part of Lady Eccles, initially in collaboration with her first husband, Donald F. Hyde, and later with the encouragement and support of her second husband, David, Viscount Eccles, to assemble one of the world’s finest collections of eighteenth-century English literature. The catalogue, including essays on Johnson’s literary durability and on Donald and Mary Hyde’s life as collectors, pays tribute to a great literary icon and to a remarkably generous woman who devoted her life to collecting an astonishing array of books, manuscripts, prints, and other rare artifacts relating to his life and times.

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Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

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Discover the number one bestselling phenomenon that is a powerful and profound mediation on grief expressed through the trials of training a goshawk.**WINNER OF THE COSTA BOOK OF THE YEAR**** WINNER OF THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION**As a child, Helen Macdonald was determined to become a falconer, learning the arcane terminology and reading all the classic books. Years later, when her father died and she was struck deeply by grief, she became obsessed with the idea of training her own goshawk. She bought Mabel for £800 on a Scottish quayside and took her home to Cambridge, ready to embark on the long, strange business of trying to train this wildest of animals.H is for Hawk is an unflinchingly honest account of Macdonald's struggle with grief during the difficult process of the hawk's taming and her own untaming. This is a book about memory, nature and nation, and how it might be possible to reconcile death with life and love.**SELECTED BY CARIAD LLOYD ON BBC TWO'S BETWEEN THE COVERS**'This beautiful book is at once heartfelt and clever in the way it mixes elegy with celebration' Andrew Motion'It just sings. I couldn't stop reading' Mark Haddon, bestselling author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time'Dazzling... Deeply affecting, utterly fascinating and blazing with love and intelligence' Financial Times

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The story of the extraordinary relationship between Francis Barber, a former slave, and Samuel Johnson, England’s most distinguished man of letters“A remarkable work of detection, a biography of a black Briton from the eighteenth century that brings to life a rich and vital aspect of our shared history.”—David Olusoga Born into slavery in Jamaica about 1742, Francis Barber was brought to London as a young boy, becoming a servant in the household of the renowned Dr. Samuel Johnson. He joined the British navy for a time but returned to Johnson’s service, eventually becoming his friend and heir. Barber was one of thousands of black Britons in the period. This is the story of his life, the hostility and support he encountered, and his extraordinary friendship with England’s most distinguished man of letters.

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The study and reception of Samuel Johnson’s work has long been embedded in Japanese literary culture. The essays in this collection reflect that history and influence, underscoring the richness of Johnson scholarship in Japan, while exploring broader conditions in Japanese academia today. In examining Johnson’s works such as the Rambler (1750-52), Rasselas (1759), Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779-81), and Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), the contributors—all members of the half-century-old Johnson Society of Japan—also engage with the work of other important English writers, namely Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, and Matthew Arnold, and later Japanese writers, including Natsume Soseki (1867-1916). If the state of Johnson studies in Japan is unfamiliar to Western academics, this volume offers a unique opportunity to appreciate Johnson’s centrality to Japanese education and intellectual life, and to reassess how he may be perceived in a different cultural context. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

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The study and reception of Samuel Johnson’s work has long been embedded in Japanese literary culture. The essays in this collection reflect that history and influence, underscoring the richness of Johnson scholarship in Japan, while exploring broader conditions in Japanese academia today. In examining Johnson’s works such as the Rambler (1750-52), Rasselas (1759), Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779-81), and Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), the contributors—all members of the half-century-old Johnson Society of Japan—also engage with the work of other important English writers, namely Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, and Matthew Arnold, and later Japanese writers, including Natsume Soseki (1867-1916). If the state of Johnson studies in Japan is unfamiliar to Western academics, this volume offers a unique opportunity to appreciate Johnson’s centrality to Japanese education and intellectual life, and to reassess how he may be perceived in a different cultural context. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

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Published in the bicentennial year of Samuel Johnson’s death, Johnson and His Age includes contributions by some of the nation’s most eminent scholars of eighteenth-century literature. A section on Johnson’s life and thought presents fresh analyses of Johnson’s friendships with Mrs. Thrale and George Steevens, new information on Johnson’s relations with Smollett and Thomas Hollis, a speculative essay on “Johnson and the Meaning of Life,” and a provocative examination of “Johnson, Traveling Companion, in Fancy and Fact.”Other essays reinterpret basic assumptions in Johnson’s criticism and examine “The Antinomy of Style” in Augustan poetics, Hume’s critique of criticism, and the broad Anglo-Scots inquiry on subjectivity in literature. A section on major figures of the age discusses Gray and the problems of literary transmissions, Hogarth’s book illustrations for friends, Gibbon’s oratorical “silences,” Blake’s concept of God, and Burke’s attempt to forestall Britain’s ruinous policy toward the American colonies. A section on the novel examines that genre from Richardson and Sterne to Austen.Among the contributors are Bertrand H. Bronson, Jean H. Hagstrum, Patricia Meyer Spacks, Robert Haisband, Howard D. Weinbrot, Mary Hyde, Ralph W. Rader, Lawrence Lipking, Gwin J. Kolb, John H. Middendorf, W. B. Carruichan, and Max Byrd.

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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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" . . . a sophisticated and thoughtful study." —Leeds African Studies Bulletin"A very impressive work . . . in the concreteness of its research documentation as well as in its theoretical scope, this study brings a truly innovative dimension to African literary scholarship, and indeed to the whole field of African studies." —Abiola Irele, Ohio State University"The discussion reveals a combination of formidable analytical and critical strength with a refreshingly open-minded and sensible approach to his field." —Karin Barber, University of Birmingham

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In recent years there has been an extended debate about Enlightenment thought. Though many scholars have concluded that there were several "Enlightenments," some continue to make generalizations about the Englightenment and some speak about "the Enlightment agenda." After discussing the cult of the deathbed scene in eighteenth-century Britain and France, the author looks at three currents of Enlightment thought implicit in the deathbed "projects" of David Hume, Samuel Johnson, and Jean Paul Marat. Although Hume and Johnson hold profoundly different views of religion, their political thinking has much in common. Their reformist thought differs radically from what might be called the transformist thought of Marat, who hoped the French would become disinterested citizens whose civil religion was patriotism. The author argues that Enlightment thought was more varied and-in its reformist current-less hostile to tradition than many observers have allowed. Enlightment thought was less a cluster of ideas than a debate about a number of questions, especially the following: how to contain religious and secular fanaticism (or what was called enthusiasm); what are the effects of luxury; and what is the nature of the passions. There was, as J.G.A. Pocock says, "a family of Enlightments," and "there is room for the recognition of family quarrels..." Why look at deathbed scenes to chart the currents of Enlightment thought? Because an interest in deathbed scenes was widespread in eighteenth-century Britain and France. The final days of Hume stirred up a controversy that lasted for at least a decade and the final days of Johnson also attracted a great deal of attention, but Marat's death had the greatest impact of the three. His assassination gave impetus to the Jacobins' attempt to eliminate the influence of the church and greatly expand the influence of the state. Marat's project to transform France failed, but so did the projects of Hume and Johnson. Hume argued that religious belief was based on the foolish fear of

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The 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.

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Previously published as The Shorter Pepys, Samuel Pepys' The Diary of Samuel Pepys: A Selection is a collection of scintillating first-hand accounts of Restoration England, from the most tumultuous events to the simplest domestic pleasures, selected and edited by Robert Latham.The 1660s represent a turning point in English history, and for the main events - the Restoration, the Dutch War, the Great Plague, the Fire of London - Pepys provides a definitive eyewitness account. As well as recording public and historical events, Pepys paints a vivid picture of his personal life, from his socializing and amorous entanglements, to his theatre-going and his work at the Navy Board. Unequalled for its frankness, high spirits and sharp observations, the diary is both a literary masterpiece and a marvellous portrait of seventeenth-century life.Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) achieved fame as a naval administrator and a friend and colleague of the powerful and learned. For nearly ten years he kept a private diary in which he recorded life in Restoration London, commenting on politics, public events, and private matters.If you enjoyed The Diary of Samuel Pepys, you might like Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock and Other Major Writings, also available in Penguin Classics.''For anyone who wants to get to grips with Pepys but quails at more than a million words, here is the solution: Robert Latham's beautifully judged abridgment of the Diary. Pure pleasure'Clare Tomalin, author of Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self'This prince of Diarists, this most amiable and admirable of men, has at last been worthily served'Paul Johnson, Spectator

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As part of the Samuel Johnson tercentenary commemoration, the University of Georgia Press published the first full scholarly edition of Sir John Hawkins’s Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1787). From its inception, Hawkins’s work, arising from a close relationship with Johnson that spanned over forty-five years, challenged certain adulatory views of Johnson and has continued to raise interesting critical questions about both Johnsonian biography and the genre of biography generally. Reconsidering Biography collects new essays that explore Hawkins’s biography of Johnson within its historical, political, legal, and personal contexts. More particularly, this volume considers how Hawkins’s approach to recording the Life of Johnson opens up broader questions about early modern biography and its relationship with eighteenth-century trends in aesthetics, politics, and historiography. These sophisticated and informed essays on a curious and often vexed friendship, and its literary offspring, supply a colorful and expansive view of the role of life-writing in the eighteenth-century literary imagination.

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*Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize*In late eighteenth-century London, a group of extraordinary people gathered around a dining table once a week.The host was Joseph Johnson, publisher and bookseller and he was joined at dinner by a shifting constellation of great minds including William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Henry Fuseli, Anna Barbauld and Mary Wollstonecraft.Johnson's years as a maker of books saw profound change in Britain and abroad. In this remarkable portrait of a revolutionary age, Daisy Hay captures a changing nation through the stories of the men and women who wrote it into being, and whose ideas still influence us today.'Rich in period and personal detail' Guardian'Hugely engrossing' Sunday Times

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In The Happiness Project, she worked out general theories of happiness. Here she goes deeper on factors that matter for home, such as possessions, marriage, time and parenthood. How can she control the cubicle in her pocket? How might she spotlight her family's treasured possessions? And it really was time to replace that dud toaster.And what does she want from her home? A place that calms her, and energises her. A place that, by making her feel safe, will free her to take risks. Also, while Rubin wants to be happier at home, she wants to appreciate how much happiness is there already.So, starting in September (the new January), Rubin dedicates a school year - September through May - to making her home a place of greater simplicity, comfort and love. Each month, Rubin tackles a different theme as she experiments with concrete, manageable resolutions - and this time, she coaxes her family to try some resolutions, as well. With her signature blend of memoir, science, philosophy and experimentation, Rubin's passion for her subject jumps off the page, and reading just a few chapters of this book will inspire readers to find more happiness in their own lives.

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The story of the group of extraordinary eighteenth-century writers, artists, and thinkers who gathered weekly at a London tavernNamed one of the 10 Best Books of 2019 by the New York Times Book Review • A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2019 • A Kirkus Best Book of 2019 “Damrosch brings the Club’s redoubtable personalities—the brilliant minds, the jousting wits, the tender camaraderie—to vivid life.”—New York Times Book Review“Magnificently entertaining.”—Washington Post 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.

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Dr. Samuel Mudd, a simple country doctor, found himself caught up in the vagaries of history, loss, betrayal and unimaginable deprivation. He paid the consequences for treating the broken leg of President Lincoln's assassin—an unjust conviction based on political expedience—and imprisonment in Fort Jefferson on a remote island in the Gulf of Mexico. Deprived of liberty, bound in chains and banished from home and family, he spent four years living under appalling conditions. Then the yellow fever epidemic swept through the island prison. Dr. Mudd battled the disease ceaselessly to save those who imprisoned him, before falling victim himself. After the epidemic had run its course, 300 surviving soldiers signed a petition to President Johnson to free Dr. Mudd. Yet he continued to fight relentlessly to gain his release through the federal judicial system. Through it all, he maintained his strong principles, humanity and most importantly, his hope.

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Samuel Johnson’s life was situated within a rich social and intellectual community of friendships—and antagonisms. Community and Solitude is a collection of ten essays that explore relationships between Johnson and several of his main contemporaries—including James Boswell, Edmund Burke, Frances Burney, Robert Chambers, Oliver Goldsmith, Bennet Langton, Arthur Murphy, Richard Savage, Anna Seward, and Thomas Warton—and analyzes some of the literary productions emanating from the pressures within those relationships. In their detailed and careful examination of particular works situated within complex social and personal contexts, the essays in this volume offer a “thick” and illuminating description of Johnson’s world that also engages with larger cultural and aesthetic issues, such as intertextuality, literary celebrity, narrative, the nature of criticism, race, slavery, and sensibility.Contributors: Christopher Catanese, James Caudle, Marilyn Francus, Christine Jackson-Holzberg, Claudia Thomas Kairoff, Elizabeth Lambert, Anthony W. Lee, James E. May, John Radner, and Lance Wilcox. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

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