Samuel Johnson
Regular price
€41.99
18th century
A01=Frank Brady
A01=William Wimsatt
aesthetics
Author_Frank Brady
Author_William Wimsatt
british literature
Category=DNL
classics
collins
correspondence
cowley
dictionary
drama
english language
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
gray
idler
johnson on shakespeare
letters
lexicography
linguistics
literary criticism
literary theory
lives of the poets
london poem
million
nature on man
poetry
pope
preface to the dictionary
rambler
rasselas
satire
savage
social commentary
swift
Product details
- ISBN 9780520035522
- Weight: 862g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 07 Feb 1978
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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This is a major new selection of Samuel Johnson's best work, delightfully introduced by W. K. Wimsatt and scrupulously annotated by Frank Brady and Mr. Wimsatt. Samuel Johnson, the only writer in English since the Renaissance to give his name to a literary period, was the center of English letters in his time. He was Dictionary Johnson, the lexicographer who had single-handedly settled the English language (it was hoped) on a firm basis; he was the author of a handful of fine poems, including two of the most remarkable satires of the century; he was a moralist whose "Rambler and Idler" essays, and novel-of-ideas "Rasselas", provided a searching view of men and matters. And in his final years he produced his greatest work, that extraordinary combination of biography and criticism which came to be known as the "Lives of the Poets".This first extensive anthology of Johnson's writings to be published in many years emphasizes Johnson the writer. It responds to those aspects of Johnson's work of special interest to modern readers.
It comprises a selection of Johnson's letters, all of his major poems (including "London"), "Rasselas", twenty-one "Rambler", nineteen "Idlers", the "Prefaces to the Dictionary" and to the edition of Shakespeare, and the following "Lives of the Poets: Cowley, Milton, Swift, Pope, Savage, Collins, and Gray". All these works are extensively annotated and printed complete. Mr. Wimsatt, one of the outstanding Johnsonians of this century, provides in his introduction a clear, connected biographical account of Johnson, stressing his writings. An up-to-date bibliography is also included. Johnson's varied accomplishments - as poet, as moralist, as biographer, as critic - are all amply represented.
Frank Brady is Professor of English at the City University of New York; the late W. K. Wimsatt was Sterling Professor of English at Yale. Both editors have worked on the Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell and are, by virtue of their extensive publication on Boswell and Johnson, among the leadign scholars of this period.
