Johnson in Japan

Johnson in Japan

Author: Kimiyo Ogawa

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2020-10-16

Total Pages: 151

ISBN-13: 1684482437

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The study and reception of Samuel Johnson’s work has long been embedded in Japanese literary culture. The essays in this collection reflect that history and influence, underscoring the richness of Johnson scholarship in Japan, while exploring broader conditions in Japanese academia today. In examining Johnson’s works such as the Rambler (1750-52), Rasselas (1759), Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779-81), and Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), the contributors—all members of the half-century-old Johnson Society of Japan—also engage with the work of other important English writers, namely Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, and Matthew Arnold, and later Japanese writers, including Natsume Soseki (1867-1916). If the state of Johnson studies in Japan is unfamiliar to Western academics, this volume offers a unique opportunity to appreciate Johnson’s centrality to Japanese education and intellectual life, and to reassess how he may be perceived in a different cultural context. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.


Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson

Author: Freya Johnston

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2012-11-15

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0191637033

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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.


Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson

Author: James T. Boulton

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2002-06-01

Total Pages: 426

ISBN-13: 1134782497

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The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling students and researchers to read for themselves, for example, comments on early performances of Shakespeare's plays, or reactions to the first publication of Jane Austen's novels. The carefully selected sources range from landmark essays in the history of criticism to journalism and contemporary opinion, and little published documentary material such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included, in order to demonstrate the fluctuations in an author's reputation. Each volume contains an introduction to the writer's published works, a selected bibliography, and an index of works, authors and subjects. The Collected Critical Heritage set will be available as a set of 68 volumes and the series will also be available in mini sets selected by period (in slipcase boxes) and as individual volumes.


The Politics of Samuel Johnson

The Politics of Samuel Johnson

Author: J. Clark

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2012-06-12

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1137265329

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A major academic controversy has raged in recent years over the analysis of the political and religious commitments of Samuel Johnson, the most commanding of the 'commanding heights' of eighteenth-century English letters. This book, one of a trilogy from Palgrave, brings that debate to a decisive conclusion, retrieving the 'historic Johnson.'


The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Johnson

The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Johnson

Author: Jack Lynch

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-08-25

Total Pages: 705

ISBN-13: 0192513591

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No major author worked in more genres than Samuel Johnson—essays, poetry, fiction, criticism, biography, scholarly editing, lexicography, translation, sermons, journalism. His works are more extensive than those of any other canonical English writer, and no earlier writer's life was documented as thoroughly by contemporaries. Because it's so difficult to know him thoroughly, people have made do with surrogates and simplifications. But Johnson was much more complicated than the popular image of 'Dr. Johnson' suggests: socially conservative but also one of the most radical abolitionists of his age, a firm believer in social hierarchy but an outspoken supporter of women intellectuals, an uncompromising Christian moralist but also a penetrating critic of family structures. Labels fit him poorly. In The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Johnson, an international team of thirty-six scholars offers the most comprehensive examination ever attempted of one of the most complex figures in English literature. The book's first section examines Johnson's life and the texts of his works; the second, organized by genre, explores all his major works and many of his minor ones; the third, organized by topic, covers the subjects that were most important to him as a writer, as a thinker, and as a moralist.


The Interpretation of Samuel Johnson

The Interpretation of Samuel Johnson

Author: J. Clark

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2012-06-12

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 1137264721

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A major academic controversy has raged in recent years over the analysis of the political and religious commitments of Samuel Johnson, the most commanding of the 'commanding heights' of eighteenth-century English letters. This book, one of a trilogy from Palgrave, brings that debate to a decisive conclusion, retrieving the 'historic Johnson.'


Anatomy Of Madness Vol 1

Anatomy Of Madness Vol 1

Author: W F Bynum

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-10-24

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1136524924

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This is a collection of essays on the history of Psychiatry. Volume I of three, offers works around people and ideas including those of Samuel Johnson, Jon Conolly, Descartes, Freud, Darwin and Hamlet. Most of the papers in these volumes arose from a seminar series on the history of psychiatry and a one-day seminar on the same theme held at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London, during the academic year 1982-83.