Johnson's Critical Presence: Image, History, JudgementAshgate, 2004 - 172 pages 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. |
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Page x
... Johnsonian Criticism ' , interrogates the claims of those critics who have sought the source of Johnson's critical practice in the acquired prejudices of his early career , and it is here that I suggest the first of several means by ...
... Johnsonian Criticism ' , interrogates the claims of those critics who have sought the source of Johnson's critical practice in the acquired prejudices of his early career , and it is here that I suggest the first of several means by ...
Page 109
... Johnsonian figure , like a convict being marched to the gallows for his crimes , stripped to the waist and wearing a dunce's cap , is that of a huge cart - horse or bear . Johnson had been dubbed Dr. Pomposo by Charles Churchill in his ...
... Johnsonian figure , like a convict being marched to the gallows for his crimes , stripped to the waist and wearing a dunce's cap , is that of a huge cart - horse or bear . Johnson had been dubbed Dr. Pomposo by Charles Churchill in his ...
Page 112
... Johnsonian monster of Macaulay's prose . Johnson , according to Macaulay , is one of the ' heads which will live for ever on the canvass of Reynolds ' , " and his account of Johnson's physical eccentricities may have been suggested by ...
... Johnsonian monster of Macaulay's prose . Johnson , according to Macaulay , is one of the ' heads which will live for ever on the canvass of Reynolds ' , " and his account of Johnson's physical eccentricities may have been suggested by ...
Contents
Personal History and the NonReductive | 15 |
Historicization and the Judgment of Shakespeare | 38 |
Johnson Reads Cowley | 64 |
Copyright | |
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