This book offers an analysis of the life and thought of the writer Samuel Johnson from an historian's viewpoint, reversing the orthodoxy which has dominated the subject for over thirty years. Jonathan Clark, who has written extensively on English and American religion, ideology and politics in the eighteenth century, presents here a Johnson strikingly different from the apolitical, pragmatic and eccentric figure who emerges from the pages of most students of English literature. Johnson's commitments and conflicts in religion and politics, obscured since Macaulay, are reconstructed; his role in the literary dynamics of his age is revealed against a new context for English cultural politics between the Restoration and the age of Romanticism. This book will therefore be of interest not only to Johnsonians but to historians of ideas and students of English literature.

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.

No major author worked in more genres than Samuel Johnson—essays, poetry, fiction, criticism, biography, scholarly editing, lexicography, translation, sermons, journalism. His works are more extensive than those of any other canonical English writer, and no earlier writer's life was documented as thoroughly by contemporaries. Because it's so difficult to know him thoroughly, people have made do with surrogates and simplifications. But Johnson was much more complicated than the popular image of 'Dr. Johnson' suggests: socially conservative but also one of the most radical abolitionists of his age, a firm believer in social hierarchy but an outspoken supporter of women intellectuals, an uncompromising Christian moralist but also a penetrating critic of family structures. Labels fit him poorly. In The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Johnson, an international team of thirty-six scholars offers the most comprehensive examination ever attempted of one of the most complex figures in English literature. The book's first section examines Johnson's life and the texts of his works; the second, organized by genre, explores all his major works and many of his minor ones; the third, organized by topic, covers the subjects that were most important to him as a writer, as a thinker, and as a moralist.

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.

The traditional view of Samuel Johnson has been that of a reactionary conservative. Although many have worked to undermine this stereotype, perhaps enough remains to claim Johnson as a representative of modernity. This book aims to demonstrate that Johnson is a figure of modernity, one with an appeal many modernist writers found irresistible.

With these two volumes Princeton University Press concludes the first scholarly edition of the letters of Samuel Johnson to appear in forty years. Volume IV chronicles the last three years of Johnson's life, an epistolary endgame that includes the breakup of the friendship with Hester Thrale and a poignant reaching out to new friends and new experiences. Volume V includes not only the comprehensive index but those undated letters that cannot confidently be assigned to a specific year, "ghost" letters (those whose existence is documented in other sources), three letters that have recently been recovered, and translations of Johnson's letters in Latin. Originally published in 1994. 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.

Samuel Johnson, one of the most renowned authors of the eighteenth century, became virtually a symbol of English national identity in the century following his death in 1784. In Samuel Johnson and the Making of Modern England Nicholas Hudson argues that Johnson not only came to personify English cultural identity but did much to shape it. Hudson examines his contribution to the creation of the modern English identity, approaching Johnson's writing and conversation from scarcely explored directions of cultural criticism - class politics, feminism, party politics, the public sphere, nationalism, and imperialism. Hudson charts the career of an author who rose from obscurity to fame during precisely the period that England became the dominant ideological force in the Western world. In exploring the relations between Johnson's career and the development of England's modern national identity, Hudson develops new and provocative arguments concerning both Johnson's literary achievement and the nature of English Nationhood.

Samuel Johnson is not only famous for his English Dictionary, and as the subject of Boswell's great biography; he was also the author of many different kinds of books - biographies, essays, literary criticism, poetry - and a regular though anonymous contributor to newspapers, magazines and to books by others. There was a little of the business of authors that he did not know, or about which he did not express a judgement. This bibliography by the distinguished Johnson scholar, the late J.D. Fleeman, records Johnson's literary output in chronological order, illuminating not only his multifarious writings but also the development of his career and reputation as a professional writer. It reveals the range of his work and the variety of his anonymous contributions (some of them first identified by Fleeman). Detailed analysis of the works examined sheds light on the practices of the 18th century book trade, and indentified editions, early and late, many of which are valuable and unjustly neglected. The bibliography also lists new editions up to 1984, the bicentenary of Johnson's death, charting the course of his posthumous literary reputation.