The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Johnson

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 image of 'Dr. Johnson' suggests: socially conservative but also one of the most radical abolitionists of his age, a firm believer in social hierarchy but an outspoken supporter of women intellectuals, an uncompromising Christian moralist but also a penetrating critic of family structures. Labels fit him poorly.

In The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Johnson, an international team of thirty-six scholars offers the most comprehensive examination ever attempted of one of the most complex figures in English literature. The book's first section examines Johnson's life and the texts of his works; the second, organized by genre, explores all his major works and many of his minor ones; the third, organized by topic, covers the subjects that were most important to him as a writer, as a thinker, and as a moralist.


Author: Jack Lynch
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 12/22/2022
Pages: 704
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 3.05lbs
Size: 9.20h x 7.20w x 2.50d
ISBN: 9780198794660

About the Author

Jack Lynch, Professor of English, Rutgers University-Newark

Jack Lynch received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, and is Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark. He is the author or editor of twenty books to date, including The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson (Cambridge, 2003), Deception and Detection in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Ashgate, 2008), Samuel Johnson in Context (Cambridge, 2012), and The Oxford Handbook of British Poetry, 1660-1800 (OUP, 2016). With J. T. Scanlan, he edits The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual.