Biography was Samuel Johnson's favorite among literary genres, and his Lives of the Poets is often regarded as the capstone of his career. The central place of biography in his oeuvre is explored in this collection of nine original essays by leading Johnson scholars. Varied in their focus and approach, the essays range from a philosophical overview of Johnson's notion of the relation between life and art, to a detailed reading of the Life of Milton, to a speculation on the value of the Lives in the classroom. Emerging clearly in the essays are the dual concerns—artistic and intellectual—that can be pursued in Johnson's biographical writings. On the one hand, they are complex creative works that reward literary analysis, traditional and modern. On the other, with their wide range, they offer a special insight into Johnson's eighteenth-century world—the state of biography at the time, the tradition of English poetry, literary criticism and its philosophical values, and, of course, Johnson himself with his powers and failings. Domestick Privacies thus offers important new perspectives not only to professed Johnsonians but to all who study biography, criticism, and the eighteenth century.

Biography was Samuel Johnson's favorite among literary genres, and his Lives of the Poets is often regarded as the capstone of his career. The central place of biography in his oeuvre is explored in this collection of nine original essays by leading Johnson scholars. Varied in their focus and approach, the essays range from a philosophical overview of Johnson's notion of the relation between life and art, to a detailed reading of the Life of Milton, to a speculation on the value of the Lives in the classroom. Emerging clearly in the essays are the dual concerns -- artistic and intellectual.

This book traces the development of literary biography in the eighteenth century; how writers' melancholy was probed to explore the inner life. Case studies of a number of significant authors reveal the 1790s as a time of biographical experimentation. Reaction against philosophical biography led to a nineteenth-century taste for romanticized lives.

Philosophy and literary theory have devoted a great deal of their analysis to the problem of the origin and modalities of argumentation, but there has been an almost total lack of interest in the question of its procedural limits. Manners of Interpretation is an essay on ways of ending interpretations in literary studies as well as on patterns of controversy and consensus in the humanities. Tamen examines two major families of indisputable arguments in post-Enlightenment literary criticism and addresses the question of how one recognizes the proper time to use a given argument, especially and specifically an indisputable argument. The former aim leads to a tentative history of the constitution of literary theory as a set of identifiable ways of using arguments. The latter, meanwhile, points to a theory of argument and controversy and to a contribution to the discussion of human activities that, in spite of not being teachable, are nevertheless learnable. Such a theory seems to be particularly relevant both to the study of the interpretive dimension of literary criticism as it is now practiced and also to the knowledge and description of an area of the humanities that has often been neglected.

This Companion, first published in 1997, provides an introduction to the works and life of one of the key figures in English literary history.

American historians of the early national period, argues Eileen Ka-May Cheng, grappled with objectivity, professionalism, and other “modern” issues to a greater degree than their successors in later generations acknowledge. Her extensive readings of antebellum historians show that by the 1820s, a small but influential group of practitioners had begun to develop many of the doctrines and concerns that undergird contemporary historical practice. The Plain and Noble Garb of Truth challenges the entrenched notion that America’s first generations of historians were romantics or propagandists for a struggling young nation. Cheng engages with the works of well-known early national historians like George Bancroft, William Prescott, and David Ramsay; such lesser-known figures as Jared Sparks and Lorenzo Sabine; and leading political and intellectual elites of the day, including Francis Bowen and Charles Francis Adams. She shows that their work, which focused on the American Revolution, was often nuanced and surprisingly sympathetic in its treatment of American Indians and loyalists. She also demonstrates how the rise of the novel contributed to the emergence of history as an autonomous discipline, arguing that paradoxically “early national historians at once described truth in opposition to the novel and were influenced by the novel in their understanding of truth.” Modern historians should recognize that the discipline of history is itself a product of history, says Cheng. By taking seriously a group of too-often-dismissed historians, she challenges contemporary historians to examine some ahistorical aspects of the way they understand their own discipline.

This is a book about the biographical afterlives of the Romantic poets and the creation of literary biography as a popular form. It focuses on the Lives of six major poets of the period: Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Felicia Hemans, and Letitia Landon, published from the 1820s, by Thomas Moore, Mary Shelley, Thomas De Quincey, and others. It situates these within the context of the development of biography as a genre from the 1780s to the 1840s. Starting with Johnson, Boswell, and female collective Lives, it looks at how the market success of biography was built on its representation and publication of domestic life. In the 1820s and 30s biographers 'domesticated' Byron, Shelley, and other poets by situating them at home, opening up their (often scandalous) private lives to view, and bringing readers into intimate contact with greatness. Biography was an influential transmitter of the myth of 'the Romantic poet', as the self-creating, masculine genius, but it also posed one of the first important challenges to that myth, by revealing failures in domestic responsibility that were often seen as indicative of these writers' inattention to the needs of the reader. The Domestication of Genius is the most comprehensive account to date of the shaping of the Romantic poets by biography in the nineteenth-century. Written in a lively and accessible style, it casts new light on the literary culture of the 1830s and the transition between Romantic and Victorian conceptions of authorship. It offers a powerful re-evaluation of Romantic literary biography, of major biographers of the period, and of the posthumous reputations of the Romantic poets.

The traditional view of Samuel Johnson as hostile to particulars, trifles, and aesthetic mediocrity only half-explains his authorial character. Samuel Johnson and the Art of Sinking 1709-1791 argues that, in a period dominated by social and literary hierarchies, Johnson's works reveal a defining interest in 'little', 'mean', or 'low' topics and people. Freya Johnston moves away from a critical emphasis on what literature of this period excludes, to consider its modes of including recalcitrant material. Of necessity finite, any piece of writing is informed by the subject matter it omits or to which it indirectly alludes. How can we identify the peripheral topics or characters purportedly 'excluded' from a text, unless it provides compelling inferences that oblige us to supply the omission? In which case, something subtler is at work than barefaced proscription. Rehearsing the comparative merits of great and little things, Johnson and his contemporaries tested the opposing claims of pagan and Christian authority. Ancient criticism, and its eighteenth-century adherents, held that each subject required an appropriate style: little matters call for the low, lofty ones for the high. Yet Gospel writers stressed Christ's incarnation as a praiseworthy and imitable descent to the humanly little — one that is compatible with the most sublime style. Through a series of close readings, this book examines how Johnson conceived of his relationships to and with the margins of writing and of society. It proposes that his literary and critical practice is neither inclusive nor exclusive in its attitudes towards peripheral things.

This book reappraises Dickens's Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi and his imaginative engagement with its principal protagonist.

Nineteenth-century American authors, critics, and readers believed that biography had the power to shape individuals' characters and to help define the nation's identity. In an age predating radio and television, biography was not simply a genre of writing, says Scott Casper; it was the medium that allowed people to learn about public figures and peer into the lives of strangers. In this pioneering study, Casper examines how Americans wrote, published, and read biographies and how their conceptions of the genre changed over the course of a century. Campaign biographies, memoirs of pious women, patriotic narratives of eminent statesmen, "mug books" that collected the lives of ordinary midwestern farmers--all were labeled "biography," however disparate their contents and the contexts of their creation, publication, and dissemination. Analyzing debates over how these diverse biographies should be written and read, Casper reveals larger disputes over the meaning of character, the definition of American history, and the place of American literary practices in a transatlantic world of letters. As much a personal experience as a literary genre, biography helped Americans imagine their own lives as well as the ones about which they wrote and read.