Samuel Johnson – författare

Book by Samuel Johnson, published in 1775. The Journey was the result of a three-month trip to Scotland that Johnson took with James Boswell in 1773. It contains Johnson's descriptions of the customs, religion, education, trade, and agriculture of a society that was new to him. The account in Boswell's diary, published after Johnson's death as The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1785), offers an intimate personal record of Johnson's behavior and conversation during the trip.

This volume contains a generous selection from the essays Johnson published twice weekly as 'The Rambler' in the early 1750s. It was here that he first created the literary character and forged the distinctive prose style that established him as a public figure. Also included here is the best of Johnson's later journalism, including essays from the periodicals 'The Adventurer' and 'The Idler'.

Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, leaves the easy life of the Happy Valley, accompanied by his sister Nekayah, her attendant Pekuah, and the much-travelled philosopher Imlac. Their journey takes them to Egypt, where they study the various conditions of men's lives, before returning home in a 'conclusion in which nothing is concluded'. Johnson's tale is not only a satire on optimism, but also an expression of truth about the human mind and its infinite capacity for hope.

Samuel Johnson's Dictionary, published in 1755, marked a milestone in a language in desperate need of standards. No English dictionary before it had devoted so much space to everyday words, been so thorough in its definitions, or illustrated usage by quoting from Shakespeare and other great writers. Johnson's was the dictionary used by Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, Wordsworth and Coleridge, the Brontës and the Brownings, Thomas Hardy and Oscar Wilde. This new edition, edited by David Crystal, will contain a selection from the original, offering memorable passages on subjects ranging from books and critics to dreams and ethics.

A scholarly edition of the poems of Samuel Johnson. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

A scholarly edition of a work by Samuel Johnson. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

In 1773, James Boswell made a long-planned journey across the Scottish Highlands with his English friend Samuel Johnson; the two spent more than a hundred days together. Their tour of the Hebrides resulted in two books, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), a kind of locodescriptive ethnography and Johnson's most important work between his Shakespeare edition and his Lives of the Poets. The other, Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson (1785), a travel narrative experimenting with biography, the first application of the techniques he would use in his Life of Samuel Johnson (1791). These two works form a natural pair and, owing that they cover much of the same material, are often read together, focusing on the Scottish highlands.The text presents a lightly-edited version of both works, preserving the original orthography and corrected typographical errors to fit modern grammar standards. The introduction and notes provide clear and concise explanations on Johnson and Boswell's respective careers, their friendship and grand biographical projects. It also examines the Scottish Enlightenment, the status of England and Scotland during the Reformation through to the Union of the Crowns, and the Jacobite

'If a man is to write A Panegyrick, he may keep vices out of sight; but if he professes to write A Life, he must represent it really as it was.'In the last of his major writings, Samuel Johnson looked back over the previous two centuries of English Literature in order to describe the personalities as well as the achievements of the leading English poets. The major Lives - of Milton, Dryden, Swift, and Pope - are memorable cameos of the life of writing in which Johnson is as attentive to human frailty as to literary prowess. The shorter Lives preserve some of Johnson's most piercing, critical judgements. Unsentimental, opinionated, and quotable, The Lives of the Poets continues to influence the reputations of the writers concerned. It is one of the greatest works of English criticism, but also one of the most humanly diverting.This selection of the Lives of ten of the most important poets draws its text from Roger Lonsdale's authoritative complete edition. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

'What then is to be done? said Rasselas; the more we inquire, the less we can resolve.'Rasselas and his companions escape the pleasures of the 'happy valley' in order to make their 'choice of life'. By witnessing the misfortunes and miseries of others they may come to understand the nature of happiness, and value it more highly. Their travels and enquiries raise important practical and philosophical questions concerning many aspects of the human condition, including the business of a poet, the stability of reason, the immortality of the soul, and how to find contentment. Johnson's adaptation of the popular oriental tale displays his usual wit and perceptiveness; sceptical and probing, his tale nevertheless suggests that wisdom and self-knowledge need not be entirely beyond reach. This new edition relates the novel to Johnson's life and thought and to politics, society, and the global context of the Seven Years War. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Johnson himself wrote in 1782: 'I know not that I have written any thing more generally commended than the Lives of the Poets'. Always recognized as a major biographical and critical achievement, Samuel Johnson's last literary project is also one of his most readable and entertaining, written with characteristic eloquence and conviction, and at times with combative trenchancy.Johnson's fifty-two biographies constitute a detailed survey of English poetry from the early seventeenth century down to his own time, with extended discussions of Cowley, Milton, Waller, Dryden, Addison, Prior, Swift, Pope, and Gray. The Lives also include Johnson's memorable biography of the enigmatic Richard Savage (1744), the friend of his own early years in London.Roger Lonsdale's Introduction describes the origins, composition, and textual history of the Lives, and assesses Johnson's assumptions and aims as biographer and critic. The commentary provides a detailed literary and historical context, investigating Johnson's sources, relating the Lives to his own earlier writings and conversation, and to the critical opinions of his contemporaries, as well as illustrating their early reception. This is the first scholarly edition since George Birkbeck Hill's three-volume Oxford edition (1905).This is volume two of four.

Johnson himself wrote in 1782: 'I know not that I have written any thing more generally commended than the Lives of the Poets'. Always recognized as a major biographical and critical achievement, Samuel Johnson's last literary project is also one of his most readable and entertaining, written with characteristic eloquence and conviction, and at times with combative trenchancy.Johnson's fifty-two biographies constitute a detailed survey of English poetry from the early seventeenth century down to his own time, with extended discussions of Cowley, Milton, Waller, Dryden, Addison, Prior, Swift, Pope, and Gray. The Lives also include Johnson's memorable biography of the enigmatic Richard Savage (1744), the friend of his own early years in London.Roger Lonsdale's Introduction describes the origins, composition, and textual history of the Lives, and assesses Johnson's assumptions and aims as biographer and critic. The commentary provides a detailed literary and historical context, investigating Johnson's sources, relating the Lives to his own earlier writings and conversation, and to the critical opinions of his contemporaries, as well as illustrating their early reception. This is the first scholarly edition since George Birkbeck Hill's three-volume Oxford edition (1905).This is volume four of four.

This authoritative edition was formerly published in the acclaimed Oxford Authors series under the general editorship of Frank Kermode. It brings together a unique combination of Johnson's poetry and prose - all the major poems, complemented by essays, criticism, and fiction - to give the essence of his work and thinking. Samuel Johnson's literary reputation rests on such a varied output that he defies easy description: poet, critic, lexicographer, travel writer, essayist, editor, and, thanks to his good friend Boswell, the subject of one of the most famous English biographies. This volume celebrates Johnson's astonishing talent by selecting widely across the full range of his work. It includes 'London' and 'The Vanity of Human Wishes' among other poems, and many of his essays for the Rambler and Idler. The prefaces to his edition of Shakespeare and his famous Dictionary, together with samples from the texts, are given, as well as selections from A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, the Lives of the Poets, and Rasselas in its entirety. There is also a substantial representation of lesser-known prose, and of his poetry, letters, and journals. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

An examination of the importance of paper in the work of Soviet artist, designer, and architect El Lissitzky.  Russian artist El Lissitzky’s work spans painting, photography, theatrical and exhibition design, architecture, graphic design, typography, and literature. He was active in the Jewish cultural renaissance, formed an artists’ collective with Kazimir Malevich, was a key figure in the dissemination of early Soviet art in Western Europe, and designed propaganda for the Stalin regime. With such a varied history and body of work, scholars have often struggled to identify the core principles that tied his diverse oeuvre together.  In El Lissitzky on Paper, Samuel Johnson argues that Lissitzky’s commitment to creating works on paper is a constant that unites his endeavors. Paper played a key role in the utopian projects that informed Lissitzky’s work, and the artist held a commitment to print as the premier medium of immediate public exchange. Johnson analyzes and contextualizes this idea against the USSR’s strict management of this essential resource and the growth of new media communications, including the telephone, telegraph, and film.  With this book, Johnson presents a significant contribution to scholarship on this major artist, revealing new connections between Lissitzky’s work in architecture and visual art and bringing to light sources from largely unstudied Russian archives.

An ample and varied section of accessible essays by Samuel Johnson  This selection of the cream of the writing from volumes II to V of the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson fills the largest remaining gap in easily available eighteenth-century texts for the student and general reader. The edition provides in popular form the amplest selection available of Johnson’s essays, ranging from his great moral pieces to the valuable essays on literary criticisms. The text is that of the authoritative Yale Edition and includes full annotation. An introduction by W. J. Bate provides a concise summary of the publication history of the essays and probes in detail the moral vision that pervades most of them.

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

An anthology of the essential and enduring works of Samuel Johnson  Samuel Johnson was eighteenth-century Britain’s preeminent man of letters—moral and literary critic, biographer, lexicographer, and poet—and his influence endures to this day. This anthology, designed to make Johnson’s essential works accessible to students and general readers, draws its texts from the definitive Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. It includes many essays from The Rambler and other periodicals; Rasselas; the prefaces to Johnson’s Dictionary and his edition of Shakespeare; the complete Lives of Cowley, Milton, Pope, Savage, and Gray, as well as generous selections from A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland.The anthology is organized so that readers can focus on such topics as religion, marriage, war, and literature, and most texts are included in their entirety. The authors provide a biographical introduction and ample annotation to update and enlarge the commentary in the Yale Edition.

This edition makes available for the first time the largest collection of unpublished material by the great eighteenth-century writer and lexicographer Samuel Johnson in existence. For the revised fourth edition (1773) of Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language, Johnson and his amanuensis annotated over one hundred and twenty interleaved folio pages of the first edition, but the printer for unknown reasons failed to include the corrections. These pages, including hundreds of authorial additions and changes to the text, are reproduced here in facsimile, along with a transcription, an extensive commentary and notes. This extraordinary archive offers a unique record of Johnson's methods of revision, his collaboration with his assistants, and the preparation of printer's copy in general. Johnson's deletion and editing of hundreds of new quotations, notes, and definitions contributed by others sheds much new light on his intentions for his work and his attitudes towards language and literature.

'I am engaged to write little Lives, and little Prefaces, to a little edition of the English Poets.' So wrote Samuel Johnson to James Boswell. Such understatement! It is difficult to believe he is writing about about what Walter Jackson Bate has described as 'one of the masterpieces in the history of both biography and literary criticism.'The occasion for the work was humdrum enough. It was conceived as a countermove, by thirty-six leading London booksellers and publishers, to an 'invasion of what we call our Literary Property.' In other words, a Scottish firm, the Apollo Press, were already publishing pocket-size volumes in a series called The British Poets. Samuel Johnson was recruited to provide the apparatus for the London equivalent. From the very first life - Abraham Cowley - is was clear he was going to do much more than that. Johnson was at the height of his powers, and this was a peculiarly congenial task. In all, he wrote fifty-two lives. He was paid a mere 200 guineas. He didn't grumble saying instead, 'The fact is, not that they have paid me too little, but I have written too much.'Of this great work T. S. Eliot wrote, 'Considering all the temptations to which one is exposed in judging contemporary writing, all the prejudices which one is tempted to indulge in judging writers of the immediately preceding generation, I view Johnson's Lives of the Poets as a masterpiece of the judicial bench.' Faber Finds, in the year that celebrates the 300th anniversary of Samuel Johnson's birth, is reissuing a great work in a great edition. George Birkbeck Hill was the most celebrated nineteenth-century Samuel Johnson scholar. His edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson may be his chef d'oeuvre but his edition of Johnson's Lives of the Poets is not far behind it. It is a work of enduring scholarship which only recently has had to take second place to Roger Lonsdale's magnificent edition. Contents of Volume I: Cowley, Denham, Milton, Butler, Rochester, Roscommon, Otway, Waller, Pomfret, Dorset, Stepney, J. Philips, Walsh, Dryden.Contents of Volume II: Smith, Duke, King, Sprat, Halifax, Parnell, Garth, Rowe, Addison, Hughes, Sheffield, Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Fenton, Gay, Granville, Yalden, Tickell, Hammond. Somervile, Savage.Contents of Volume III: Swift, Broome, Pope, Pitt, Thomson, Watts, A.Philips, West, Collins, Dyer, Shenstone, Young, Mallet, Akenside, Gray, Lyttelton.

'I am engaged to write little Lives, and little Prefaces, to a little edition of the English Poets.' So wrote Samuel Johnson to James Boswell. Such understatement! It is difficult to believe he is writing about about what Walter Jackson Bate has described as 'one of the masterpieces in the history of both biography and literary criticism.'The occasion for the work was humdrum enough. It was conceived as a countermove, by thirty-six leading London booksellers and publishers, to an 'invasion of what we call our Literary Property.' In other words, a Scottish firm, the Apollo Press, were already publishing pocket-size volumes in a series called The British Poets. Samuel Johnson was recruited to provide the apparatus for the London equivalent. From the very first life - Abraham Cowley - is was clear he was going to do much more than that. Johnson was at the height of his powers, and this was a peculiarly congenial task. In all, he wrote fifty-two lives. He was paid a mere 200 guineas. He didn't grumble saying instead, 'The fact is, not that they have paid me too little, but I have written too much.'Of this great work T. S. Eliot wrote, 'Considering all the temptations to which one is exposed in judging contemporary writing, all the prejudices which one is tempted to indulge in judging writers of the immediately preceding generation, I view Johnson's Lives of the Poets as a masterpiece of the judicial bench.' Faber Finds, in the year that celebrates the 300th anniversary of Samuel Johnson's birth, is reissuing a great work in a great edition. George Birkbeck Hill was the most celebrated nineteenth-century Samuel Johnson scholar. His edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson may be his chef d'oeuvre but his edition of Johnson's Lives of the Poets is not far behind it. It is a work of enduring scholarship which only recently has had to take second place to Roger Lonsdale's magnificent edition. Contents of Volume I: Cowley, Denham, Milton, Butler, Rochester, Roscommon, Otway, Waller, Pomfret, Dorset, Stepney, J. Philips, Walsh, Dryden.Contents of Volume II: Smith, Duke, King, Sprat, Halifax, Parnell, Garth, Rowe, Addison, Hughes, Sheffield, Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Fenton, Gay, Granville, Yalden, Tickell, Hammond. Somervile, Savage.Contents of Volume III: Swift, Broome, Pope, Pitt, Thomson, Watts, A.Philips, West, Collins, Dyer, Shenstone, Young, Mallet, Akenside, Gray, Lyttelton.

'I am engaged to write little Lives, and little Prefaces, to a little edition of the English Poets.' So wrote Samuel Johnson to James Boswell. Such understatement! It is difficult to believe he is writing about about what Walter Jackson Bate has described as 'one of the masterpieces in the history of both biography and literary criticism.'The occasion for the work was humdrum enough. It was conceived as a countermove, by thirty-six leading London booksellers and publishers, to an 'invasion of what we call our Literary Property.' In other words, a Scottish firm, the Apollo Press, were already publishing pocket-size volumes in a series called The British Poets. Samuel Johnson was recruited to provide the apparatus for the London equivalent. From the very first life - Abraham Cowley - is was clear he was going to do much more than that. Johnson was at the height of his powers, and this was a peculiarly congenial task. In all, he wrote fifty-two lives. He was paid a mere 200 guineas. He didn't grumble saying instead, 'The fact is, not that they have paid me too little, but I have written too much.'Of this great work T. S. Eliot wrote, 'Considering all the temptations to which one is exposed in judging contemporary writing, all the prejudices which one is tempted to indulge in judging writers of the immediately preceding generation, I view Johnson's Lives of the Poets as a masterpiece of the judicial bench.' Faber Finds, in the year that celebrates the 300th anniversary of Samuel Johnson's birth, is reissuing a great work in a great edition. George Birkbeck Hill was the most celebrated nineteenth-century Samuel Johnson scholar. His edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson may be his chef d'oeuvre but his edition of Johnson's Lives of the Poets is not far behind it. It is a work of enduring scholarship which only recently has had to take second place to Roger Lonsdale's magnificent edition. Contents of Volume I: Cowley, Denham, Milton, Butler, Rochester, Roscommon, Otway, Waller, Pomfret, Dorset, Stepney, J. Philips, Walsh, Dryden.Contents of Volume II: Smith, Duke, King, Sprat, Halifax, Parnell, Garth, Rowe, Addison, Hughes, Sheffield, Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Fenton, Gay, Granville, Yalden, Tickell, Hammond. Somervile, Savage.Contents of Volume III: Swift, Broome, Pope, Pitt, Thomson, Watts, A.Philips, West, Collins, Dyer, Shenstone, Young, Mallet, Akenside, Gray, Lyttelton.

Thanks to Boswell’s monumental biography of Samuel Johnson, we remember Dr. Johnson today as a great wit and conversationalist, the rationalist epitome and the sage of the Enlightenment. He is more often quoted than read, his name invoked in party conversation on such diverse topics as marriage, sleep, deceit, mental concentration, and patriotism, to generally humorous effect. But in Johnson’s own day, he was best known as an essayist, critic, and lexicographer: a gifted writer possessed of great force of mind and wisdom. Writing a century after Johnson, Ruskin wrote of Johnson’s essays: He “taught me to measure life, and distrust fortune…he saved me forever from false thoughts and futile speculations.” Peter Martin here presents “the heart of Johnson,” a selection of some of Johnson’s best moral and critical essays. At the center of this collection are the periodical essays from the Rambler, Adventurer, and Idler. Also included are Johnson’s great moral fable, Rasselas; the Prefaces to the Dictionary and his edition of Shakespeare; and selections from Lives of the Poets. Together, these works—allied in their literary, social, and moral concerns—are the ones that continue to speak urgently to readers today.