Samuel Johnson: A Biography - Softcover

Martin, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0674057376 ISBN 13: 9780674057371

Verlag: BELKNAP PR, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

A Biography

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Críticas:

The story is well told, quotations from Boswell and Johnson are frequent and judicious, the anecdotes (familiar to some) are enlivening, and a picture of the fierce, complicated, manically eccentric genius emerges that will provoke admiration and wonder.--Rex Murphy"Globe and Mail" (02/21/2009)

A fetching new version of the life of Samuel Johnson.--Julia Keller"Chicago Tribune" (10/19/2008)

[An] outstanding new biography.--Christopher Hitchens"The Atlantic" (03/01/2009)

Meticulously researched and well written.--James Srodes"Washington Times" (01/25/2009)

Peter Martin's biography of Samuel Johnson is a profoundly poignant and eloquent account of the Western world's greatest literary critic. It is superior even to Martin's valuable biography of Boswell.--Harold Bloom

As Johnson's three hundredth birthday approaches, the time is ripe for a new biography that takes into account all we have learned about Johnson in this century and the later years of the last. Martin knows and tells. The result is a highly readable, deeply informed book that should find a broad and appreciative audience.--Robert Folkenflik, University of California, Irvine

Martin offers a convincing psychological study.--Leah Price"New York Times Book Review" (02/01/2009)

[Martin] is a literary conduit, bringing Johnson from the 18th-century English Tory world of letters down to the modern reader... [He is] an author who writes with an eloquent propinquity, a delightful sense of companionship, about a figure otherwise clouded in antiquity... He shows why the man is still so influential and--important this--still read.--Michael Coren"National Post" (09/19/2009)

As author also of A Life of James Boswell, Martin knows the territory and obviously enjoys it... The tercentenary of the birth of so large a figure is more than enough reason for new perspectives, and Martin's work is worthwhile.--G. Shivel"Choice" (07/01/2009)

Building on his previous work on James Boswell, Samuel Johnson's most celebrated biographer, Peter Martin has written a humane, coherent and accessible life of the great eighteenth-century polymath, deftly and sympathetically exploring his personal relationships and psyche while also locating him in the literary culture of his age.--Henry Hitchings, author of Dr Johnson's Dictionary: The Extraordinary Story of the Book that Defined the World

Reseña del editor:

Bewigged, muscular and for his day unusually tall, adorned in soiled, rumpled clothes, beset by involuntary tics, opinionated, powered in his conversation by a prodigious memory and intellect, Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) was in his life a literary and social icon as no other age has produced. “Johnsonianissimus,” as Boswell called him, became in the hands of his first biographers the rationalist epitome and sage of Enlightenment. These clichés—though they contain elements of truth—distort the complexity of the public and private Johnson. Peter Martin portrays a Johnson wracked by recriminations, self-doubt, and depression—a man whose religious faith seems only to have deepened his fears. His essays, scholarship, biography, journalism, travel writing, sermons, fables, as well as other forms of prose and poetry in which he probed himself and the world around him, Martin shows, constituted rational triumphs against despair and depression. It is precisely the combination of enormous intelligence and frank personal weakness that makes Johnson’s writing so compelling.

Benefiting from recent critical scholarship that has explored new attitudes toward Johnson, Martin’s biography gives us a human and sympathetic portrait of Dr. Johnson. Johnson’s criticism of colonial expansion, his advocacy for the abolition of slavery, his encouragement of women writers, his treatment of his female friends as equals, and his concern for the underprivileged and poor make him a very “modern” figure. The Johnson that emerges from this enthralling biography, published for the tercentenary of Johnson’s birth, is still the foremost figure of his age but a more rebellious, unpredictable, flawed, and sympathetic figure than has been previously known.

Über diese Auflage

• Verlag: BELKNAP PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0674057376
• ISBN 13: 9780674057371
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Anzahl der Seiten: 642