A01=Philip Smallwood
Author_Philip Smallwood
Brambles
canon formation research
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Cordelia's Death
Cordelia’s Death
Cowley's Poems
Cowley's Poetry
cowleys
Cowley’s Poems
Cowley’s Poetry
Critical Past
criticism
dialogic theory literature
Dick Minim
Dominique Bouhours
drama
Draper Hill
eighteenth-century literary criticism
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historicisation of literary judgment
historiography of criticism
James Gillray
Johnson's Account
Johnson's Contribution
Johnson's Criticism
Johnson's Praise
Johnson's Preface
Johnsonian Ideas
johnsons
Johnson’s Account
Johnson’s Criticism
Johnson’s Praise
Johnson’s Preface
Jonathan Arac
mason
mingled
Mingled Drama
Modern French Poetry
past
Periodical Papers
Personae
Pindarique Odes
poetic analysis methodology
poetry
romanticism influence studies
samuel
Timeless
tom
Xref Ref Type
Young Man
Product details
- ISBN 9780754633570
- Weight: 510g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 28 Jan 2004
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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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 stems in part from historians' tendency to tell the story of criticism as a narrative of improvement. The image of Johnson conceived by his antagonists in the eighteenth century has been perpetuated by romanticism, by nineteenth-century representational routines and mediated to the present day, most recently, by varieties of 'radical theory'. In Johnson's Critical Presence Smallwood offers a new account of Johnson's major critical writings conceived according to a different kind of historical potential. He suggests that the historicization of eighteenth-century criticism can best be understood in the light of the 'dialogic' and 'translational' historiographies of Collingwood, Gadamer and Ricoeur, and that the explanatory contexts of Johnson's criticism must include poetry in addition to theory; in this his study seeks to displace both the history of ideas as the leading paradigm for the history of criticism and to question the developmental narrative on which it relies. By in-depth analysis of Johnson's response to Shakespeare's plays and to the poetry of Abraham Cowley, Smallwood constructs a non-reductive context of emotional experience for Johnson's criticism. This embraces the dynamic satirical caricatures by James Gillray of Johnson as critic, the irony of Johnson's critical affinities with the major romantics, and is set against twentieth-century responses to the literary 'canon'. Smallwood argues that not only Johnson's emotional sensitivities, but also the ironic voices within the critical text itself, must be fully appreciated before Johnson's current relevance, or even his historical value, can be grasped.
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.
