A detailed investigation of Johnson's response to the Ossian controversy, with a transcription of a rare anti-Ossian pamphlet he co-authored.

James Macpherson's famous hoax, publishing his own poems as the writings of the ancient Scots bard Ossian in the 1760s, remains fascinating to scholars as the most successful literary fraud in history. This study presents the fullest investigation of his deception to date, by looking at the controversy from the point of view of Samuel Johnson. Johnson's dispute with Macpherson was an argument with wide implications not only for literature, but for the emerging national identities of the British nations during the Celtic revival. Thomas M. Curley offers a wealth of genuinely new information, detailing as never before Johnson's involvement in the Ossian controversy, his insistence on truth-telling, and his interaction with others in the debate. The appendix reproduces a rare pamphlet against Ossian written with the assistance of Johnson himself. This book will be an important addition to knowledge about both the Ossian controversy and Samuel Johnson.

From Shakespeare to Autofiction focuses on salient features of authorship throughout modernity, ranging from transformations of oral tradition and the roles of empirical authors, through collaborative authorship and authorship as ‘cultural capital’, to the shifting roles of authors in recent autofiction and biofiction. In response to Roland Barthes’ ‘removal of the Author’ and its substitution by Michel Foucault’s ‘author function’, different historical forms of modern authorship are approached as ‘multiplicities’ integrated by agency, performativity and intensity in the theories of Pierre Bourdieu, Wolfgang Iser, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The book also reassesses recent debates of authorship in European and Latin American literatures. It demonstrates that the outcomes of these debates need wider theoretical and methodological reflection that takes into account the historical development of authorship and changing understandings of fiction, performativity and new media. Individual chapters trace significant moments in the history of authorship from the early modernity to the present (from Shakespeare’s First Folio to Latin American experimental autofiction), and discuss the methodologies reinstating the author and authorship as the irreducible aspects of literary process. Praise for From Shakespeare to Autofiction 'In this collection a multicultural group of literary scholars analyse a rich array of authorship types and models across four centuries. After decades of liquid poststructuralist concepts, it is refreshing and inspiring to think through such diversity of authorship strategies – from oral culture, through sociological constructs, to self-referential and autobiographical ontological games that writers play with us, their readers.' Pavel Drábek, University of Hull

A compelling case for the importance of the heart and emotions over that of critical theory in Johnson's literary criticism.

Revises established understandings of British women writers' contributions to Enlightenment narratives of social and historical progress Drawing on original archival research, A Feminine Enlightenment argues that women writers shaped Enlightenment conversations regarding the role of sentiment and gender in the civilizing process. By reading women's literature alongside history and philosophy and moving between the eighteenth century and Romantic era, JoEllen DeLucia challenges conventional historical and generic boundaries. Beginning with Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), she tracks discussions of "e;women's progress"e; from the rarified atmosphere of mid-eighteenth-century Bluestocking salons and the masculine domain of the Scottish university system to the popular Minerva Press novels of the early nineteenth century. Ultimately, this study positions feminine genres such as the Gothic romance and Bluestocking poetry, usually seen as outliers in a masculine Age of Reason, as essential to understanding emotion's role in Enlightenment narratives of progress. The effect of this study is twofold: to show how developments in women's literature reflected and engaged with Enlightenment discussions of emotion, sentiment, and commercial and imperial expansion; and to provide new literary and historical contexts for contemporary conversations that continue to use "e;women's progress"e; to assign cultures and societies around the globe a place in universalizing schemas of development.Key FeaturesEstablishes the centrality of gender to Enlightenment discussions of social and historical development Uncovers evidence of women writers' participation in the Scottish Enlightenment's theorization of sentiment and historical progressProvides literary and historical background for ongoing discussions of the history of emotion and the study of affect

Ultimately, Writing to the World is a sophisticated look at the intersection of print and the public sphere.