Boswell's Life of Johnson is established
as one of the foremost literary biographies in the English language. This collection
of new essays, commemorating its bicentenary, investigates Boswell's achievements
and limitations in both literary and personal contexts, and goes beyond the
Life to examine the full range of Boswell's writings and interests (in legal,
social, theological, political, and linguistic fields). Drawing Boswell out
of Johnson's shadow, the volume places him in a wider context, juxtaposing Boswell
with other contemporaries and compatriots in the Scottish enlightenment, such
as Hume, Robertson and Blair. In addition it investigates some of the critical
and theoretical questions surrounding the notion of biographical representation
in the Life itself. Boswell emerges as a writer engaged throughout his literary
career in constructing a self or series of selves out of his divided Scottish
identity. This collection
Preface
- Introduction: Boswell’s ambiguities.
David Daiches
combines new archival research with
fresh critical perspectives and constitutes a timely review of Boswell's current
status in eighteenth-century literary studies.
Contents
- Boswell and the rhetoric of friendship. Thomas Crawford
- Scottish divines and legal lairds: Boswell’s Scots Presbyterian identity.
Richard B. Sher
- Boswell and the Scotticism. Pat Rogers
- Boswell as critic. Joan H. Pittock
- Boswell’s liberty-loving Account of Corsica and the art of
travel literature. Thomas M. Curley
- Boswell and sympathy: the trial and execution of John Reid. Gordon Turnbull
- Boswell and Hume: the deathbed interview. Richard B. Schwartz
- “This Philosophical Melancholy:” style and self in Boswell and
Hume. Susan Manning
- The originality of Boswell’s version of Johnson’s quarrel with
Lord Chesterfield. John J. Burke, Jr.
- Self-restraint and the self-display in the authorial comments in the Life
of Johnson. Marlies K. Danziger
- Johnson’s conversation in Boswell’s Life of Johnson.
John J. Korshin
- Remembering the hero in Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Donna
Heiland
- Truth and artifice in Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Greg Clingham
Index
“Clingham has produced an exemplary,
or nearly exemplary, selection of valuable contributions to our understanding
of the man who, two hundred years ago, brought a totally new dimension to the
art of biography.”
James Gray in the
Dalhousie Review
“Clingham deserves special tribute
as editor of New Light on Boswell…. Generally useful and often illuminating
… this collection will stimulate much discussion and start new ways of thinking
about Boswell’s major achievement.”
Irma S. Lustig in
The Age of Johnson
“Anyone interested in the art of
biography … or indeed in the relation of narrative to history will emerge from
the final section instructed about both issues and techniques.”
Patricia B. Craddock
in SEL
“Clingham has assembled an excellent
collection that will prove useful to graduate students and seasoned scholars
alike… Highly recommended.”
P.D. McGlynn in Choice
“This collection is distinguished
by its consistently broad, original, and serious scholarship. On Boswell as
man and writer there is much here that is provocative, convincing, and exciting:
Essential reading not only for Boswellians and Johnsonians, but for all of us
who are concerned with the theoretical, historical, and practical questions
of writing lives in general, as those questions arise in travel-writing and
fiction as well as in biography and autobiography.”
Marcus Walsh in Review
of English Studies
“Clingham, in his closing essay,
proposes a unified field theory of Boswellian studies whereby even detractors
like Greene can be seen to share, with Rader, Dowling, Bogel (admirers of Boswell’s
art), and Pottle, Waingrow, and Clifford (advocates of his accuracy), a fundamental
Boswellian conviction as to the radical separation between “art” and “truth,”
rather than a Johnsonian vision which treats the two as separate but potentially
continuous, even symbiotic…. His essay, easier to recommend than to abstract,
has much to offer all Boswell’s readers because it takes attentive, sympathetic
account of so many of their perspectives. Clingham manages to do triumphantly
what his collection by its nature can accomplish only fitfully: to synthesize
much of what has come before, and so to say the next important thing.”
Stuart Sherman in
The Johnsonian Newsletter
