Bucknell University Press Books on Johnson
"Johnson at Bucknell" By Greg Clingham, press director
published in Johnsonian News Letter, Vol.LIX, No.1 (March 2008), p. 30-32
The last decade has seen some of the worst of times for scholars working in eighteenth-century literature, and some of the best. While many publishers – including some of our oldest and biggest – have drastically cut their eighteenth-century output as a means of dealing with the so called “crisis of the monograph,” and in an effort to maintain the bottom line demanded by their universities and governing bodies, Johnson has fared less badly than others in the austere climate. Oxford, of course, has recently published the monumental Lives of the English Poets edited by Roger Lonsdale (2006), and Yale has continued gradually to issue volumes in their standard scholarly edition of Johnson’s works, the completion of which is immanent with the publication within the next couple of years of their edition of the Lives. Likewise, the last decade has established The Age of Johnson, first under Paul Korshin and now under Jack Lynch, as the preeminent vehicle for critical, historical and biographical work on Johnson and his times when that work can appropriately take the form of an article (short or long).
However, only a few presses have published monographs and multi-authored volumes on Johnson over the last decade, a choice that, I believe, is a sign of their enlightened status and their commitment to the liberal arts, rather than of their old-fashioned redundancy. Among these few are, primarily, Cambridge University Press and our close relative, the University of Delaware Press, both of whom continue to find Johnson’s writings and his times worthy of scholarly discussion.
As the tide begins to turn once again in favour of humanistic discussion of Johnson and other eighteenth-century authors, and as we approach the tercentenary of Johnson’s birth, when we are likely to see a flurry of published Johnsonian work, I’d like to bring to the reader’s attention Bucknell University Press’s recent history in publishing on Johnson. Over the last decade we have to our credit the following books that deal wholly or mainly with Johnson’s writings, and which range widely in critical kind, from bibliographical and textual studies to editorial work to cultural and theoretical contextualization to postcolonial considerations to close humanistic and empirical readings of Johnson’s texts and their interconnections with other texts over time:
Feeling British: Sympathy and National Identity in Scottish and English Writing, 1707-1832
By Evan Gottlieb
2007, $52.50
Feeling British argues that the discourse of sympathy both encourages and problematizes a sense of shared national identity in eighteenth-century and Romantic British literature and culture. Although the 1707 Act of Union officially joined England and Scotland, government policy alone could not overcome centuries of feuding and ill will between these nations. Accordingly, the literary public sphere became a vital arena for the development and promotion of a new national identity: Britishness. The book starts by examining the political implications of the Scottish Enlightenment's theorization of sympathy, the mechanism by which emotions are shared between people. From these philosophical beginnings, this study tracks how sympathetic discourse is deployed by a variety of authors - including Defoe, Smollett, Johnson, Wordsworth, and Scott - invested in constructing, but also in questioning, an inclusive sense of what it means to be British.
Samuel Johnson: The Latin Poems
Translated and Edited by Niall Rudd
2005, $43.50
This edition of Johnson's Latin Poems contains a Preface and Introduction followed by text, translation (prose), and brief notes on the poems. Several corrections have been made to the standard text. The notes deal with the obscurities and provide comment on style and treatment. It is often interesting to see how Johnson uses his Latin sources, especially Horace, to add a dimension to his meaning. There are numerous links with familiar episodes in Johnson's life, e.g., his trip to the Hebrides, the revision of his dictionary, his recovery from illness; and there are instances (notable in the anguished appeals for mercy in his prayers), where the more distant Latin form enables Johnson to say things about himself that he would never have expressed in English. The reader will find new details added to the well-loved portrait.
The Selected Essays of Donald Greene
Edited by John Lawrence Abbott
2004, $57.50
Donald Greene suggested that the eighteenth century should be seen as "The Age of Exuberance." It was an era unmatched, he argued, for intellectual ferment and literary accomplishment of the highest order. In his numerous books and in an essay canon that has few scholarly parallels in the postwar period, Greene helped recenter not only the age as a whole but also its principal writer, Samuel Johnson. He did so with a consistent scholarly commitment: one must reexamine intellectual and literary documents always in reference to the milieu and the values of the world in which they were reproduced; one must take no critical judgment, however imposing its author's reputation, on faith. Not only did Greene help redefine "The Age of Exuberance" and Samuel Johnson as few scholars of the post-World War II era, he also demonstrated that his scholarly methodology could illuminate such literary figures as Jane Austen, a near chronological neighbor, and equally a more distant one Evelyn Waugh. The essays included here provide a sample of a far larger canon that might fairly be characterized as F. R. Leavis did of Johnson's critical commentary "alive and life-giving."
The Anxieties of Idleness: Idleness in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture
By Sarah Jordan
2003, $52.50
The Anxieties of Idleness: Idleness in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture investigates the preoccupation with idleness that haunts the British eighteenth century. Sarah Jordan argues that as Great Britain began to define itself as a nation during this period, one important quality it claimed for itself was industriousness. But this claim was undermined and complicated by, among other factors, the importance of leisure to the upholding of class status, thus making idleness a subject of intense anxiety. One result of this anxiety was an increased surveillance of the supposed idleness of marginalized and less powerful members of society: the working classes, the nonwhite races, and women
Johnson Re-Visoned: Looking Before and After
Edited by Philip Smallwood
2001
How far does Johnson's mind touch the critical consciousness of the present day, and how far is the modern experience of his writings a form of historical knowledge? This volume of essays by British and American scholars seeks to answer these questions from a sequence of argued perspectives that looks both to the past and to the potential future of Johnson's reputation. Johnson Re-Visioned persuasively demonstrates that in the current debates about scholarship, nationalism, race, gender, history, criticism, and poetry, the discomforting counter-complacency of Samuel Johnson carries a radical authority across the years in between.
Click here to see the paperback version of Johnson Re-Visioned (2009), $27.95
Three Deaths and Enlightenment Thought: Hume, Johnson, Marat
By Stephen Miller
2001, $38.50
In recent years there has been an extended debate about Enlightenment thought. Though many scholars have concluded that there were several "Enlightenments," some continue to make generalizations about the Englightenment and some speak about "the Enlightment agenda." After discussing the cult of the deathbed scene in eighteenth-century Britain and France, the author looks at three currents of Enlightment thought implicit in the deathbed "projects" of David Hume, Samuel Johnson, and Jean Paul Marat. Although Hume and Johnson hold profoundly different views of religion, their political thinking has much in common. Their reformist thought differs radically from what might be called the transformist thought of Marat, who hoped the French would become disinterested citizens whose civil religion was patriotism.
A Neutral Being Between the Sexes: Samuel Johnson's Sexual Politics
By Kathleen Nulton Kemmerer
1998, Out of Print
Samuel Johnson's image in the popular imagination - that is of a swaggering misogynist, a denigrator of women and their abilities - is based largely on frequently repeated quotations gleaned from Boswell's famous Life. By contrast, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many women intellectuals who were familiar with Johnson's works considered him a champion of women, and able defender in the ongoing debate about female nature and ability that had been going on since the middle ages, the querelle des femmes. In this study, Kathleen Nulton Kemmerer reclaims this earlier image of Johnson as a strong advocate of women's education, full participation in intellectual life, and full equality with men for the happiness of all society.
Bad Behavior: Samuel Johnson and Modern Cultural Authority
By Martin Wechselblatt
1998, $36.00
In this book, Martin Wechselblatt explores Samuel Johnson's double professional self-construction as alternately Augustan sage and Grub Street hack: as the exemplary "Dr. Johnson" and as one of the many "authors to let" brought to life and just as suddenly extinguished by mass-market publishing. Unlike previous studies of Johnson and print culture, however, Bad Behavior is concerned with the reasons so many readers and critics of Johnson have been led to regularly subsume into the monumental precedent of Johnson the sage, the material conditions of modern authority expressed by self-reflections of Johnson the hack.
A Biographer At Work: Samuel Johnson's Notes for the "Life of Pope"
By Harriet Kirkley
2002, $48.50
This book is the first complete transcription of hitherto unpublished notes by Johnson for the "Life of Pope" (British Library Add. MS. 5994). Kirkley provides Johnson scholars with a scrupulous study of Johnson's editing system as well as a critical study of how these notes mediate the processes of reading and composing, providing critical insight into Johnson's modes of textual production.
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