Front cover image for Samuel Johnson : literature, religion, and English cultural politics from the Restoration to Romanticism

Samuel Johnson : literature, religion, and English cultural politics from the Restoration to Romanticism

This book offers an analysis of the life and thought of the writer Samuel Johnson from an historian's viewpoint, reversing the orthodoxy which has dominated the subject for over thirty years. Jonathan Clark presents here a strikingly different Johnson from the usual apolitical, pragmatic and eccentric figure of the standard accounts.
Print Book, English, 1994
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994
Biographies
xiv, 270 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm
9780521473040, 9780521478854, 0521473047, 0521478855
30436481
1. Politics, Literature and the Culture of Humanism. I. The vernacular and the classical. II. The Lives of the Poets: the trajectory of English letters. III. The political significance of the Anglo-Latin tradition. IV. The Jacobite cause as ideology, satire and tragedy
2. Johnson and the Anglo-Latin Tradition. I. The cultural politics of rebellion: William Lauder. II. The failure of the Anglo-Latin tradition and the rise of the vernacular. III. 'Caledonian bigotry': the poems of Ossian
3. The Political Culture of Oxford University, 1715-1768. I. Oxford's public image. II. State oaths and the intelligentsia. III. Tempora mutantur, 1750-1768
4. Johnson's Career and the Question of the Oasis, 1709-1758. I. Johnson's family background. II. A nonjurors at Oxford, 1728-1729. III. A career frustrated, 1729-1758
5. Johnson and the Nonjurors. I. The nonjurors: survival and decline. II. The theology of the nonjurors. III. Politics and religious commitment