Research Catalog

Title

Reconsidering biography : contexts, controversies, and Sir John Hawkins's Life of Johnson / edited by Martine W. Brownley.

Publication

Lewisburg [Pa.] : Bucknell University Press ; Lanham, Md. : Co-published with the Rowman & Littlefield Pub. Group, ©2012.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

Brownley, Martine Watson.

Description

xxii, 174 pages : illustrations; 24 cm

Summary

"As part of the Samuel Johnson tercentenary commemoration, the University of Georgia Press published the first full scholarly edition of Sir John Hawkins's Life of Samuel Johnson, LL. D. (1787). From its inception, Hawkins's work, arising from a close relationship with Johnson that spanned over forty-five years, challenged certain adulatory views of Johnson and has continued to raise interesting critical questions about both Johnsonian biography and the genre of biography generally. Reconsidering Biography collects new essays that explore Hawkins's biography of Johnson within its historical, political, legal, and personal contexts. More particularly, this volume considers how Hawkins's approach to recording the Life of Johnson opens up broader questions about early modern biography and its relationship with eighteenth-century trends in aesthetics, politics, and historiography. These sophisticated and informed essays on a curious and often vexed friendship, and its literary offspring, supply a colorful and expansive view of the role of life-writing in the eighteenth-century literary imagination."--Publisher's website.

Subject

• Hawkins, John, 1719-1789
• Hawkins, John
• Biography as a literary form
• biographies (literary works)

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations and Short Titles -- Introdcution: Why Hawkins? -- Re-Assessing Sir John Hawkins's The Life of Samuel Johnson, L.L.D.: Some Reflections -- Sir John Hawkins and the Development of English Biography -- A Rhetoric of Truth and Instruction: Hawkins's The Life of Samuel Johnson, L.L.D., and Eighteenth-Century Biographical Practice -- Hawkins and Biography as a Genre -- Hawkin's The Life of Samuel Johnson, L.L.D., and Modern Biographies -- Sir John Hawkins's Johnson and His Contexts -- Sir John Hawkins on Richard Savage and the Profession of Authorship -- From Bigotry to Genius: The Treatment of Johnson's Poltics in Hawkins's The Life of Samuel Johnson, L.L.D. -- Hawkin's Biography, and the Law -- Bibliography -- Notes on Contributors.

ISBN

• 9781611483833
• 1611483832
• 9781611483840
• 1611483840

LCCN

2011032558

OCLC

• ocn733232744
• 733232744
• SCSB-14696854

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library