The Literary Criticism of Samuel Johnson

'Philip Smallwood has been writing insightfully and eloquently about Samuel Johnson for thirty years. The Literary Criticism of Samuel Johnson confirms his standing as one of our most authoritative, appealing scholars of Johnson and literature. Drawing on a lifetime of reading and thinking Smallwood sensitively explores the artistic implications and human depths of Johnson's engagement with literature and experience – not only within the parameters of Johnson's critical traditions, both European and Classical, but particularly in his enduring concern with action, love, loss, time, death, compassion, happiness, and beginnings and endings, in which his criticism is rooted. Written with an elegance and honesty commensurate with their subject, these essays cohere to disclose a Johnson whose heart and mind inform a literary personality that continues to challenge us intellectually and to resonate with our emotional needs.' Greg Clingham, Professor of English Literature, Bucknell University
'An enquiring defence of Johnson as critic, and of literary criticism as a creative living medium, Philip Smallwood's new book is absorbing, richly informed and beautifully exemplified.' Freya Johnston, Professor of English Literature, University of Oxford
'An incisive book about the motives and operations of Samuel Johnson's literary criticism …' Michael Adams, Modern Philology
'In a brilliant reconsideration of The literary criticism of Samuel Johnson, Smallwood (Birmingham City Univ., UK) argues that affective response, not rational analysis, drove Johnson's literary pronouncements. As Smallwood thoroughly demonstrates, lived experience-emotional, relational, philosophical, temporal, editorial-is at the heart of Johnson's critical enterprise. Johnson's work on Shakespeare and his Lives of the Poets are particularly important texts in Smallwood's account, but one of the most interesting aspects of the study is Smallwood's exploration of conversations (some real, some imagined) between Johnson and a host of other writers, from poet David Ferry to Thomas Warton to Montaigne to F. R. Leavis. Johnson's literary criticism, Smallwood demonstrates, everywhere evidences his experience of compassion and emotion, time and duration, immersion in the vicissitudes of life and awareness of the inevitability of death. Smallwood's book does full justice to Johnson's critical acumen; it (perhaps more importantly) exemplifies literary criticism as a creative, deeply human enterprise.' Elizabeth Kraft, Choice
'The book makes a compelling argument for the ongoing value of Johnson's criticism. Although Smallwood's insistence on the links between the text and the sensibility that informs its creation runs counter to much recent critical theory, nonetheless he illustrates his argument persuasively by judicious use of supporting evidence and the pertinent enlistment of writers not often associated with Johnson, from Montaigne to Bergson and Wittgenstein, to elicit underlying continuities. By so doing, Smallwood shows that the ideas that obsessed Johnson were also important to other writers and thinkers throughout history. He was, accordingly, a very different writer from the one that he has been traditionally taken to be. Johnson challenges us because of this difference, and Smallwood's book is to be praised for demonstrating it.' Phil Jones, The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats
'A sympathetic and illuminating critical appreciation that situates Johnson the man and the writer at the intersection of autobiography, biography, and criticism. As Smallwood shows, Johnson's lived experience, his emotional experience in particular, gives shape to his biographical insights and exerts a powerful formative influence on the critical precepts by which he judged and evaluated the literary work of his fellow writers. Smallwood's key recognition, that 'the heart's role as a principle of judgment is primary' for Johnson, has resulted in a book that enables us to value anew the deep humanity of Johnson's critical and moral judgments.' Frans De Bruyn, Johnsonian News Letter