For more than twenty years, The Age of Johnson has aspired to present to a wide readership a body of influential Johnsonian scholarship “in the broadest sense,” as founder Paul J. Korshin put it. In keeping with this sentiment, volume 25 contains cant-free scholarly articles and essays written by both leaders in the field and emerging scholars, among them a London barrister and a medical school professor. Featuring lively and penetrating work on Johnson’s medical conditions, his e...

A "brief but potent" appreciation of one of the most influential and revolutionary works of political thought "mixing biography, criticism and philosophy" ( Los Angeles Times).Christopher Hitchens, the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of God Is Not Great, has been called a Tom Paine for our times. In this addition to the Books that Changed the World Series, Hitchens vividly introduces Paine and his Declaration of the Rights of Man...

"[A] marvelous account" of Johnson's towering achievement, nearly a decade of labor and linguistic fact-finding, presented by "a buoyant, zestful writer" ( The Boston Globe).By the early eighteenth century, France and Italy had impressive lexicons, but there was no authoritative dictionary of English. Impelled by a mixture of national pride and commercial expedience, the prodigious polymath Samuel Johnson embraced the task, turning over the garret...

Robespierre's Reign of Terror spawned an evil little twin in William Pitt the Younger's Reign of Alarm, 1792-1798. Terror begat Alarm. Many lives and careers were ruined in Britain as a result of the alarmist regime Pitt set up to suppress domestic dissent while waging his disastrous wars against republican France. Liberal young writers and intellectuals whose enthusiasm for the American and French revolutions raised hopes for Parliamentary reform at home saw their prospects blasted. Over ...

In Separated by Their Sex**, Mary Beth Norton offers a bold genealogy that shows how gender came to determine the right of access to the Anglo-American public sphere by the middle of the eighteenth century.** Earlier, high-status men and women alike had been recognized as appropriate political actors, as exemplified during and after Bacon's Rebellion by the actions of—and reactions to—Lady Frances Berkeley, wife of Virginia's governor. By contrast...

The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson, first published in 1997, provides an introduction to the works and intellectual life of one of the most challenging and wide-ranging writers in English literary history. Compiler of the first great English dictionary, editor of Shakespeare, biographer and critic of the English poets, author both of the influential journal Rambler and the popular fiction Rasselas, and one of the most engaging conversationalists in literary culture, Johnson is here ...

The French Revolution ignited the biggest debate on politics and society in Britain since the Civil War 150 years earlier. The public controversy lasted from the initial, positive reaction to French events in 1789 to the outlawing of the radical societies in 1799. This Cambridge Companion highlights the energy, variety and inventiveness of the literature written in response to events in France and the political reaction at home. It contains thirteen specially commissioned essays by an inte...

No major author worked in more genres than Samuel Johnson--essays, poetry, fiction, criticism, biography, scholarly editing, lexicography, translation, sermons, journalism. His works are more extensive than those of any other canonical English writer, and no earlier writer's life was documented as thoroughly by contemporaries. Because it's so difficult to know him thoroughly, people have made do with surrogates and simplifications. But Johnson was much more complicated than the popular ima...

Before the nineteenth century, travellers who left Britain for the Americas, West Africa, India and elsewhere encountered a medical conundrum: why did they fall ill when they arrived, and why - if they recovered - did they never become so ill again? The widely accepted answer was that the newcomers needed to become 'seasoned to the climate'. Suman Seth explores forms of eighteenth-century medical knowledge, including conceptions of seasoning, showing how geographical location was essential...

A Race of Female Patriots argues that public-spirited women proliferated on the eighteenth-century British stage to catalyze an affective experience of political belonging, as dramatists imagined new forms of affiliation, allegiance, and loyalty suitable to the new British constitution established bythe Glorious Revolution of 1688. Brett D. Wilson examines both staples of the repertory (The Fair Penitent, Jane Shore) and lesser-known plays (Liberty Asserted, The Revolution of Sweden, Edwar...

Between 1789 and 1815, Britain faced a surge of challenges brought about by the French Revolution. Growing tensions with France, then the outbreak of war, exacerbated domestic political controversy, giving rise to new forms of political protest, to which the government responded with ever-increasing severity. Reforming Ideas in Britain brings together a series of essays to provide a vibrant historiography of Britain's political thought and movements during the 1790s and beyond. Challenging...

Few authors benefit from being set in their contemporary context more than Samuel Johnson. Samuel Johnson in Context is a guide to his world, offering readers a comprehensive account of eighteenth-century life and culture as it relates to his work. Short, lively and eminently readable chapters illuminate not only Johnson's own life, writings and career, but the literary, critical, journalistic, social, political, scientific, artistic, medical and financial contexts in which his works came ...