Samuel Johnson after 300 Years

Greg Clingham is Professor of English and Director of the University Press, Bucknell University. He is the editor of the Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson (Cambridge, 1997), the author of Johnson, Writing and Memory (Cambridge, 2002) and also of many other books and essays on Johnson, Boswell, Dryden and a wide range of issues in historiography and translation. Philip Smallwood is Professor of English, School of English, at Birmingham City University. He has written and lectured widely on eighteenth-century literature, theory and historiography, and is the author of a book on modern criticism, on Pope (Restructuring Criticism, 2003) and on Johnson (Johnson's Critical Presence: Image, History, Judgment, 2004), and has edited collections on Johnson and on the history of criticism.

To mark the tercentenary of Samuel Johnson's birth, specially-commissioned essays review his scholarly reputation today.

Introduction. Johnson now and in time Greg Clingham and Philip Smallwood; 1. 'We are perpetually moralists': Johnson and moral philosophy Fred Parker; 2. Johnson, ends, and the possibility of happiness Greg Clingham; 3. Johnson and the modern: the forward face of Janus Howard D. Weinbrot; 4. Samuel Johnson's politics of contingency Clement Hawes; 5. Fideism, the antisublime, and the faithful imagination in Rasselas David F. Venturo; 6. Samuel Johnson's legal thought J. T. Scanlan; 7. The life of Johnson, The Life of Johnson, the lives of Johnson Jack Lynch; 8. The awkward Johnson David Fairer; 9. Johnson's criticism, the arts, and the idea of art Philip Smallwood; 10. Toil and envy: unsuccessful responses to Johnson's Lives of the Poets Adam Rounce; 11. Early women reading Johnson Isobel Grundy; 12. Johnson and Austen Freya Johnston; 13. The Works of Samuel Johnson and the Canon O. M. Brack, Jr.; 14. What Johnson means to me David Ferry.