Johnson's Critical Presence: Image, History, JudgementSamuel 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 53
... passions and interests our curiosity ' : The artful involutions of distinct interests , the striking opposition of contrary characters , the sudden changes of fortune , and the quick succession of events , fill the mind with a perpetual ...
... passions and interests our curiosity ' : The artful involutions of distinct interests , the striking opposition of contrary characters , the sudden changes of fortune , and the quick succession of events , fill the mind with a perpetual ...
Page 122
... passion excited by real events ; they wrote naturally , and as men : feeling powerfully as they did , their language was daring , and figurative . In succeeding times , Poets , and Men ambitious of the fame of Poets , perceiving the ...
... passion excited by real events ; they wrote naturally , and as men : feeling powerfully as they did , their language was daring , and figurative . In succeeding times , Poets , and Men ambitious of the fame of Poets , perceiving the ...
Page 124
... passions . The passage is characteristic of the judgments of Johnson at their ahistorical extreme ; and when it is compared with Wordsworth's assessment of Dryden , the estimate that Johnson gives seems almost totally to remove the ...
... passions . The passage is characteristic of the judgments of Johnson at their ahistorical extreme ; and when it is compared with Wordsworth's assessment of Dryden , the estimate that Johnson gives seems almost totally to remove the ...
Contents
Personal History and the NonReductive | 15 |
Historicization and the Judgment of Shakespeare | 38 |
Johnson Reads Cowley | 64 |
Copyright | |
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Abraham Cowley Addison aesthetic Anacreon Anacreontiques Augustan Boswell's canon century chapter characters classical comedy comic conception contemporary context Cordelia Cowley Cowley's critical history critical past critical text criticism of Shakespeare cultural D.H. Lawrence diction Dryden and Pope eighteenth eighteenth-century emotional English Essay on Criticism example F.R. Leavis genius Gillray Gillray's Hazlitt historians historicization history of criticism Homer human ideas Idler imagination irony James Gillray Johnson's criticism kind King Lear language later Leavis literary criticism literary history literature Lives London manners metaphysical poets Milton mind mingled drama Mistress modern critics moral narrative nature notes observation passage passions past of criticism pleasure poem poet poetical justice Pope's praise Preface to Shakespeare present prose Rambler Rasselas reader Ricoeur romantic Samuel Johnson satirical scenes Schlegel sense stanza Stendhal suggest T.S. Eliot taste theory thought tragedy translation University Press verse vols Warton Wellek words Wordsworth writes wrote