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Samuel Johnson: New Contexts for a New Century. Edited by Howard D. Weinbrot. (San Marino: Hundngton Library Press, 2014, Pp. xi, 386. $55.00.)
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) was one of the most distinguished figures in English literary history. Celebrated as a writer, poet, critic, biographer, moralist, dramatist, conversationalist and lexicographer (among much else), he was at the center of London's rich intellectual life during the mid to late-eighteenth century. Johnson wrote extensively across an astonishing range of genres. He was also the subject of perhaps the most celebrated biography in English history, James Boswell's Life of Johnson (London: Dearborn, 1791).
Since the time of his death, Johnson and his writings have attracted extensive scholarly attention. The present volume, a collection of seventeen essays delivered at a conference on Johnson held at the Huntington Library in California in 2011 and which aims to ide_168.tify some of the still unexplored regions located on the vast Johnsonian canvas, is divided into six overlapping sections: (i) Johnson and the arts of thought;...