Description
This book is the first to assess Johnson’s multifarious views on friendship—his deeply as well as widely reflective appreciation of it—over the course of his literary career.
Of interest to scholars of both Johnson and of mid-eighteenth century British culture, it examines his portrayals of interaction with his friends, and his more overtly fictional representations of friendship, across the many genres in which he wrote.
It offers an original re-assessment of the Johnson canon, considering friendship and patronage in Lives of the Poets as well as the exercise of power, as represented in Johnson’s political writings.
The book presents a new overview of Johnson’s literary career, exploring themes and preoccupations in the discourse of friendship that Johnson inherited from classical literature.
It assesses gender relations, specifically Johnson’s portrayals of his friendships with women writers and his epistolary engagement with his friends, male and female.
The volume includes an analytic study of recent scholarship on Johnson and the idea of friendship.
Table of Contents
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction A.D. Cousins and Daniel Derrin
2 Johnson, Friendship and Politics.
Nicholas Hudson
3 ‘The Friend of Goodness’: Johnson and the ‘Life of Savage’.
Julie Crane
4 Intimate Benevolence: Friendship in Johnson’s Periodical Essays.
Paul Tankard
5 Johnson’s Friendships with Women.
Norma Clarke
6 Friendships in Prison: Imlac, Rasselas, the Hermit and the Astronomer.
A. D. Cousins
7 Friendship, Societas, and Analysis of Scotland’s Highlands and Islands.
Daniel Derrin
8 Critical Friendships in the Lives of the Poets.
Philip Smallwood
9 Seeking Minds in Unison: Johnson and his Friends in the Letters.
Pat Rogers
10 Recent Studies on Johnson and Friendship.
Dani Napton
Select Bibliography
Index
