Johnson S Critical Presence
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Johnson's Critical Presence
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.
The Literary Criticism of Samuel Johnson
Author: Philip Smallwood
language: en
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Release Date: 2023-09-21
A compelling case for the importance of the heart and emotions over that of critical theory in Johnson's literary criticism.
Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson: The Arc of the Pendulum offers unique insight into the works of Samuel Johnson by re-considering William Hazlitt's oft-cited comparison between Johnson's prose and a pendulum. In 1819, William Hazlitt condemned Samuel Johnson's prose style as 'a species of rhyming' in which 'the close of the period follows as mechanically as the oscillation of a pendulum, the sense is balanced with the sound'. Predictable, formulaic, and unresponsive, Hazlitt's Johnson was 'incapable of latitude and compromise, a mere automaton who rebounded from one position to its opposite extreme'. This collection of essays focuses on Johnson's works, rather than perceptions of his personality, and argues that Johnson's perceived erratic opinions reflect an understanding of the complexity, instability, and contradictions of the world in which he lived. The volume challenges Hazlitt's influential reading of the Johnsonian pendulum, focusing on the uses and enjoyments of inconsistency, and the varieties of instability, irresolution, and active change which are revealed by and within Johnson. Chapters from a strong team of contributors present new perspectives on Johnson's work, life, and reception. The chapters address questions of style, authority, language, lexicography, and biography across a range of Johnson's writings from the early poetry to the late prose. Johnson emerges from these chapters not as a writer trapped within a set of oppositions, but as one who engages imaginatively and vigorously with flux, dynamism, and inconclusiveness. From the late eighteenth century onwards, to be 'Johnsonian' has typically been made synonymous with firm resolution and trenchant opinion, with polysyllabic excess and a style removed from the exigencies and accidents of ordinary existence. And yet, as this volume suggests, Johnson's life and writings embody the critical and creative play of ideas, a form of interaction with the world which is shaped by instability, contradiction, and combat.