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4 books match the query 'Samuel Johnson'

cover of Regulating Confusion: Samuel Johnson and the Crowd

Regulating Confusion

Samuel Johnson and the Crowd

Thomas Reinert

Duke University Press, 1996

With the urbanization of eighteenth-century English society, moral philosophers became preoccupied with the difference between individual and crowd behavior. In so doing, they set the stage for a form of political thought divorced from traditional moral reflection. In Regulating Confusion Thomas Reinert places Samuel Johnson in the context of this development and investigates Johnson’s relation to an emerging modernity.
Ambivalent about the disruption, confusion, perplexity, and boundless variety apparent in the London of his day, Johnson was committed to the conventions of moral reflection but also troubled by the pressure to adopt the perspective of the crowd and the language of social theory. Regulating Confusion explores the consequences of his ambivalence and his attempt to order the chaos. It discusses his critique of moral generalizations, concept of moral reflection as a symbolic gesture, and account of what happens to the notion of character when individuals, having lost the support of moral convention, become faces in a crowd. Reflecting generally on the relationship between skepticism and political ideology, Reinert also discusses Johnson’s political skepticism and the forms of speculation and action it authorized.
Challenging prevalent psychologizing and humanistic interpretations, Regulating Confusion leaves behind the re-emergent view of Johnson as a reactionary ideologue and presents him in a theoretically sophisticated context. It offers his style of skepticism as a model of poise in the face of confusion about the nature of political truth and personal responsibility and demonstrates his value as a resource for students of culture struggling with contemporary debates about the relationship between literature and politics.
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cover of Samuel Johnson and Moral Discipline

Samuel Johnson and Moral Discipline

Paul Kent Alkon

Northwestern University Press, 1967

Paul Kent Alkon’s Samuel Johnson and Moral Discipline provides reading of Johnson that emphasizes his moral discourse.  Shortly after its publication, Alkon’s book became first of all the standard reading of Johnson’s essays, contrasting them with the moral ideas Johnson discussed in his sermons, as moral writings, and second, as one of the first books on Johnson to explore the essayist’s focus on moral thinking as central to his writing.

 
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cover of Samuel Johnson: A Survey and Bibliography of Critical Studies

Samuel Johnson

A Survey and Bibliography of Critical Studies

James L. Clifford and Donald J. Greene

University of Minnesota Press, 1970

Samuel Johnson was first published in 1970. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

For anyone interested in the work of Samuel Johnson and his place in eighteenth-century studies, this bibliography will be of great value, for it includes virtually everything of importance that has been written about Johnson from his own lifetime to the present. In addition, Professors Clifford and Greene, in an introductory essay, survey and evaluate the changing attitudes toward Johnson through the entire period covered in the bibliography.

This volume is a revision and enlargement of Professor Clifford's earlier work Johnsonian Studies, 1887–1950: A Survey and Bibliography,long recognized as an indispensable tool for the study of Samuel Johnson, his circle, and his times, and now out of print. The present volume contains nearly four thousand bibliographical entries, grouped under twenty-five subject headings, and arranged chronologically within each classification. This arrangement enables the student to trace the development of the scholarship of the various aspects of Johnson's life and work. A detailed author and subject index to the whole volume makes it easy for him to find the description of the particular book or article for which he is searching.

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cover of The Religious Thought of Samuel Johnson

The Religious Thought of Samuel Johnson

Chester F. Chapin

University of Michigan Press, 1968

Starting from the youthful influences that helped to form Samuel Johnson's mature religious thought, Chester F. Chapin goes on to consider the development of this thought and its relation to Anglican orthodoxy and to social and political questions.The second and major part of the book is devoted to an analysis of Johnson's mature position on certain basic issues. Chapin considers Johnson's attitude toward evidences, arguing that Johnson attempted to establish revelation by grounding it in history. He maintains that Johnson did not distinguish between Christian and non-Christian ethics, and that it was the eschatology of Christianity that he valued particularly. The intensity of Johnson's fear of death and judgment is a measure of the intensity of his faith. Chapin considers problems of evil, of free will, and of foreknowledge and necessity as Johnson struggled with them. Writers that Johnson referred to argued that foreknowledge does not imply necessity, but Chapin maintains that Johnson was not convinced by these arguments. Experience, Johnson saw, was on the side of free will, and for him this took precedence over theory.The author then turns to Johnson's social and political attitudes. His loyalty to the Church shaped other conservative attitudes. Johnson did not assert that the ultimate conversion of all men to Christianity was part of God's plan, and his attitude toward the non-Christian world approached that of live and let live. Johnson was not a relativist. Since men have the ability to distinguish good from evil, it follows that there is an objective moral order in the world.Finally, Chapin reviews the problem of human life, which so occupied Johnson's mind, and states that for Johnson religion was the only rational solution to this problem.Chapin also presents the position of Hume and other 18th-century intellectuals and provides a carefully reasoned argument concerning various questions of theology.
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