Johnson's Critical Presence demonstrates how Johnson's criticism has for long been divided from the issues of modern criticism by historical narratives that have marked the progress of criticism from 'classic to romantic'. The image of Johnson constructed by his immediate antagonists has been preserved by the routines of historical representation, and mediated to the present day, most recently, by the characterizations of 'radical theory'. By an in-depth analysis of major works by Johnson, Smallwood argues that the historicization of eighteenth-century criticism can be more fruitfully understood in the light of the 'dialogic' and 'translational' historiography of such thinkers as Collingwood and Ricoeur, and that the contexts of Johnson's criticism must include the poetry he read as well as the theories he espoused. In this way the book reinstates Johnson's 'presence' as critic while displacing the 'history of ideas' as the leading paradigm for conceptualizing the history of criticism.

Samuel Johnson is often represented as primarily antagonistic or antipathetic to Milton. Yet his imaginative and intellectual engagement with Milton's life and writing extended across the entire span of his own varied writing career. As essayist, poet, lexicographer, critic and biographer - above all as reader - Johnson developed a controversial, fascinating and productive literary relationship with his powerful predecessor. To understand how Johnson creatively appropriates Milton's texts, how he critically challenges yet also confirms Milton's status, and how he constructs him as a biographical subject, is to deepen the modern reader's understanding of both writers in the context of historical continuity and change. Christine Rees's insightful study will be of interest not only to Milton and Johnson specialists, but to all scholars of early modern literary history and biography.

Philip Smallwood celebrates the emotional power and enduring wisdom of Samuel Johnson's literary criticism, showing how the abyss of the heart informs its powerful life. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

A work of reference on 'the age of Johnson', putting literature in the context of the society that produced it.

Dead Masters examines the dual issues of mentoring and intertextuality as an integrated phenomenon. Through a series of fresh and novel readings of Johnsonian and Boswellian texts, the book further advances our awareness of the formal complexities of Johnson's writings and the psychological substratum from which they issue.

This text offers wide-ranging coverage of Samuel Johnson's life work, and reception across 15 thematically cohesive chapters. Taking as its point of departure William Hazlitt's famous comparison between Johnson's prose style and a pendulum, this volume will contest and rebalance the metaphor of the pendulum.

This book examines how Samuel Johnson was assimilated by later writers, ranging from James Boswell to Samuel Beckett. It is as much about these writers as Johnson himself, showing how they found their own space, in part, through their response to Johnson, which helped shape their writing and view of contemporary literature.