The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson

Deeply informed and accessible, this Companion unveils Johnson's strikingly progressive engagement in literature, politics, and society.

Invaluable for students, scholars, and general readers, this new Companion is deeply informed and appealingly written, offering fresh insight into Johnson's engagement with eighteenth-century literature, society, politics, and culture and revealing the surprising contemporaneity of his thinking about social justice, slavery, gender, and disability.Students, scholars, and general readers alike will find the New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson deeply informed and appealingly written. Each newly commissioned chapter explores aspects of Johnson's writing and thought, including his ethical grasp of life, his views of language, the roots of his ideas in Renaissance humanism, and his skeptical-humane style. Among the themes engaged are history, disability, gender, politics, race, slavery, Johnson's representation in art, and the significance of the Yale Edition. Works discussed include Johnson's poetry and fiction, his moral essays and political tracts, his Shakespeare edition and Dictionary, and his critical, biographical, and travel writing. A narrated Further Reading provides an informative guide to the study of Johnson, and a substantial Introduction highlights how his literary practice, philosophical values, and life experience provide a challenge to readers new and established. Through fresh, integrated insights, this authoritative guide reveals the surprising contemporaneity of Johnson's thought.