Review Of The Unknown Samuel Johnson Edited By John J Burke Jr And Donald Kay

Catherine N. Parke offers new readings of Johnson's major prose writings, the familiar and the not so familiar. Through an inquiry into the centrality of biography in his thinking, she examines Johnson's ideas about education, portrays his habits of mind, and explores his creative temperment.

Focusing on the period from about 1690 to 1890, these essays depict an age of sensibility that was in transformation. New connections are revealed between sensibility and other key preoccupations of the age, including the feminine ideal and the poetic imagination.

This text describes how 18th-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.

Biography was Samuel Johnson's favorite among literary genres, and his Lives of the Poets is often regarded as the capstone of his career. The central place of biography in his oeuvre is explored in this collection of nine original essays by leading Johnson scholars. Varied in their focus and approach, the essays range from a philosophical overview of Johnson's notion of the relation between life and art, to a detailed reading of the Life of Milton, to a speculation on the value of the Lives in the classroom. Emerging clearly in the essays are the dual concerns -- artistic and intellectual.

"The present volume [3] is the first to appear of the five that will comprise The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (henceforth OHCREL). Each volume of OHCREL will have its own editor or team of editors"--Preface.

Biography was Samuel Johnson's favorite among literary genres, and his Lives of the Poets is often regarded as the capstone of his career. The central place of biography in his oeuvre is explored in this collection of nine original essays by leading Johnson scholars. Varied in their focus and approach, the essays range from a philosophical overview of Johnson's notion of the relation between life and art, to a detailed reading of the Life of Milton, to a speculation on the value of the Lives in the classroom. Emerging clearly in the essays are the dual concerns—artistic and intellectual—that can be pursued in Johnson's biographical writings. On the one hand, they are complex creative works that reward literary analysis, traditional and modern. On the other, with their wide range, they offer a special insight into Johnson's eighteenth-century world—the state of biography at the time, the tradition of English poetry, literary criticism and its philosophical values, and, of course, Johnson himself with his powers and failings. Domestick Privacies thus offers important new perspectives not only to professed Johnsonians but to all who study biography, criticism, and the eighteenth century.

Sir Robert Chambers (1737-1803) was a literary as well as a legal man. Friend and collaborator of Samuel Johnson, professor of English law at Oxford University, and one of the four judges on the first Supreme Court of India, Chambers was an enormously influential figure in the eighteenth-century British empire. This book is the first authoritative biography of Chambers and is also the first major contribution in decades to historical scholarship on Johnson. It demonstrates Chambers's important role in early English legal education, in Samuel Johnson's life and political thinking, and in the formation of British India during a period of active cultural exchange between East and West. The cooperation of Chambers's descendants and the discovery of all his judicial notebooks have given Curley access to a splendid archival collection of rare documents about Sir Robert's private life and public career. Curley adds important dimensions to political and legal history by recounting the establishment of the Vinerian Chair of English law at Oxford University and by documenting long-hidden activities, motives, and decisions in the stormy foundation of British India, beginning with Chambers's farsighted role in the century's most infamous criminal case, the prosecution of Maharajah Nuncomar in 1775. Sir Robert Chambers is the first analysis of Chambers's groundbreaking commingling of English law and Indian practice, as detailed in seventy-two volumes of his judicial notebooks recovered in Calcutta. As an Indian judge, Chambers founded the enduring hybrid heritage of Anglo-Indian law on which the modern constitution of the Republic of India still rests. This book also provides the first full account of Chambers's close friendship with Samuel Johnson and their collaboration on a survey of the British constitution, which profoundly influenced the later writings of both men. Curley reveals Johnson's literary and political interest in India, and his call for encyclopedic study of the East by the West, a call heeded by Chambers and Sir William Jones in founding the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Amassing the largest library of Sanskrit manuscripts in the Western World, Chambers contributed significantly to European awareness of the riches of ancient Indian literature. Lively and readable, this authoritative biography examines the relationships and activities of prominent men in eighteenth-century England, and it supplements Curley's two-volume edition of Chambers's and Johnson's A Course of Lectures on the English Law. It will interest readers curious about multiculturalism--two centuries before the term existed--as it developed under the British empire. All scholars of legal and literary history and of Asian and British studies, as well as lovers of biography, should relish this absorbing and well-researched history.