Johnson and His Age

Published in the bicentennial year of Samuel Johnsons death, Johnson and His Age includes contributions by some of the nations most eminent scholars of eighteenth-century literature. A section on Johnsons life and thought presents fresh analyses of Johnsons friendships with Mrs. Thrale and George Steevens, new information on Johnsons 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 Johnsons criticism and examine The Antinomy of Style in Augustan poetics, Humes 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, Hogarths book illustrations for friends, Gibbons oratorical silences, Blakes concept of God, and Burkes attempt to forestall Britains 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.