Reconsidering Biography

As part of the Samuel Johnson tercentenary commemoration, the University of Georgia Press published the first full scholarly edition of Sir John Hawkins’s Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1787). From its inception, Hawkins’s work, arising from a close relationship with Johnson that spanned over forty-five years, challenged certain adulatory views of Johnson and has continued to raise interesting critical questions about both Johnsonian biography and the genre of biography generally. Reconsidering Biography collects new essays that explore Hawkins’s biography of Johnson within its historical, political, legal, and personal contexts. More particularly, this volume considers how Hawkins’s approach to recording the Life of Johnson opens up broader questions about early modern biography and its relationship with eighteenth-century trends in aesthetics, politics, and historiography. These sophisticated and informed essays on a curious and often vexed friendship, and its literary offspring, supply a colorful and expansive view of the role of life-writing in the eighteenth-century literary imagination.