190 Pages
by
Routledge
190 Pages
by
Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
Samuel Johnson remains one of the most frequently discussed and cited of the eighteenth-century critics; but historians of criticism have invariably interpreted his work within conventions that have allowed for little evaluative commerce between the needs of the critical present and the voices of the critical past. Smallwood's argument is that Johnson's alienation from the modern critical scene... Read more
Contents: Preface; Samuel Johnson, critical presence and the theory of the history of criticism; 'Only designing to live': personal history and the non-reductive context of Johnsonian criticism; Historicization and the judgment of Shakespeare; Historicization and literary pleasure: Johnson reads Cowley; Voice and image: critical comedy, the Johnsonian monster, and the construction of judgment; From image to history: Johnson's criticism and the genealogy of Romanticism; Conclusion: Johnson's transfusion of the critical past and the making of the literary canon; Bibliography; Index.
Biography
Philip Smallwood is Professor of English at the University of Central England and has written widely on Samuel Johnson and on the theory, practice and history of literary criticism. His books include Modern Critics in Practice (1990), Johnson Re-Visioned, an edited collection of new essays on Johnson (2001), and Reconstructing Criticism: Pope's 'Essay on Criticism' and the Logic of Definition (2003). He is the editor of Critical Pasts, a collection of essays on approaches to critical history, and co-editor of the unpublished manuscripts on critical and aesthetic themes of the British philosopher R.G. Collingwood.
Prize: Winner of a Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award 2005 'a work of considerable distinction and authority...it constitutes, in my view, one of the most important studies of Johnson's criticism - indeed of eighteenth-century criticism more generally - to have appeared in the last half century'. Professor David Hopkins, University of Bristol '... a welcome restatement of the critical pre-eminence of Samuel Johnson in English literary criticism.' TLS 'A magnificent addition to Johnson scholarship and to the study of literary criticism in general, this book will further appreciation of Johnson not only as a historical critic but also as a critic with enormous current and future relevance... Essential.' Choice '... this meticulous book...' BARS Bulletin and Review
