This chapter discusses the psychedelic rock band Amon Düül. The band was representative of the West German commune movement of the late 1960s, and their communal approach to music-making was part of their alternative lifestyle. Initially, all members of the commune participated, including children and non-musicians. They also had connections to radical groups, such as the Kommune 1 political commune. Amon Düül II split off from the original group and further developed their sound, incorporating electronic instruments and ethnic influences, as well as dealing with their identity as a German rock band in subversive and humorous ways. Their lyrics dealt with dark and uncomfortable subject matter and were intended to shock bourgeois pop music consumers. Amon Düül II were unique among bands of the Krautrock era in featuring a female lead singer. The band gained a following outside of Germany during their career, and continue to play concerts today.

One of the most ambitious ruptures inaugurated by punk was the break with previous historical continuities: ‘No Future’ urged youths to reimagine current and potential opportunities, but it also declared the past invalid for contemporary developments. Yet, despite such rhetoric, punk in West Germany looked back to Krautrock for inspiration and influence. From bands as diverse as S.Y.P.H., der Plan, D.A.F., die Krupps, and others, German punks turned to Can, Neu!, Faust, Tangerine Dream, and Kraftwerk – and the engineering talents of Conny Plank – to help them develop ‘new’ sounds, rhythms, and lyrics. Krautrock is often dismissed as irrelevant to German musical developments, drawing more interest abroad than back home in Germany. Except, as the case of punk indicates, both musically and practically, Krautrock deeply influenced punk efforts at pioneering new German popular musical advances. By examining the continuities and ruptures between Krautrock and German punk, this chapter shows how the former was a critical influence on later German musical developments, and how punk drew on past musical antecedents as they revolutionised German popular music and sought to emancipate German society.

Although Krautrock music is most often categorised geographically and historically, the increasing availability of Krautrock records offers the conditions for a broad contemporary listenership. Given this accessibility of canonical Krautrock to audiences outside of 1960s and 1970s West Germany, this chapter observes a pan-European and even intercontinental production of Krautrock today. Having briefly identified relevant musical aspects of canonical Krautrock outputs, this chapter turns to contemporary Krautrock bands operating in Germany before then addressing related musicians across continental Europe, Britain, and the Americas. The chapter also considers biographical detail and the interactions of contemporary bands with prominent early Krautrockers, who themselves endorse the ongoing production of Krautrock as a contemporary, global musical practice.

Like Johnson himself, the community of his devoted readers is divided in its attitude to the academy. Some Johnsonians are enthusiastic followers of the Great Cham striving to achieve the envied status of Johnsonianissimus without the taint of academic criticism; others are academics first and devotees of Johnson second. These humanistic scholars are often concerned with the text of Johnson, whereas the Johnsonians are concerned with his personality. A contest between these biographers, on the one hand, and those bibliographers, on the other, played itself out in the history of the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, twenty-three volumes (1958–2018). The impetus for the edition came largely from Johnsonians, but as time wore on, the academics became gradually more influential, and their approach eventually prevailed. This chapter is a kind of archaeology of the edition and reveals this shift in emphasis over time and a difference between American and British approaches to literary criticism.

Johnson’s Lives of the Poets are a classic not only of literary criticism but of biography as well. Originally intended as brief prefaces in an anthology of fifty-eight poets from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they increased in scope as Johnson worked on them, and as one commentator has said, they became “a book of wisdom and experience … a commentary on human destiny.” The lives of Milton, Swift, Dryden, and Pope are really books in their own right, and the earlier Life of Savage is a deeply felt account of someone Johnson knew well in his youth. He made good use of such documentary material as he was able to obtain, and for recent poets was able to draw upon his own memory of telling anecdotes. Above all, the Lives explore the range of human achievement, its failures and also its triumphs.

Johnson continues to offer fresh challenges and pleasures to both new and seasoned readers. This introduction sketches in some essential characteristics of Johnson as a companion, and as a critical thinker whose contemplation of time, human limitations, suffering, and the formative powers of language make him unusually contemporary – in short, a writer for life amidst a global pandemic. Drawing on his poetics of memory in Rambler 41, his remarks on Shakespeare’s King Lear, Pope’s last days, the folly of the heroic, Soame Jenyns’s metaphysics, and human failure in Rasselas, Greg Clingham suggests how Johnson engages with questions of self-knowledge, social justice (e.g., the education of women, the treatment of animals, capital punishment), and some of the political issues of the day (e.g., slavery and colonialism). In conclusion, the introduction describes the principles governing the chapters in this book, which honor the centripetal, seamless, and flexible manner of Johnson’s thinking and writing.

By considering several of Johnson’s critical essays on poetry, this chapter compares his criticism of poetry with his own practice. In his lives of Milton and Gray, Johnson emphatically rejects poetics that employ language, images, and situations distinct from ordinary experience and normal speech. Milton and Gray are found wanting in this regard, with “Lycidas” ridiculed for its pastoral fiction and Gray indicted for thinking that poetry should be written in language remote from common speech. In treating London and The Vanity of Human Wishes, Johnson’s two imitations of Juvenal’s Roman satires, Richetti explores their differences from the Roman originals and shows how Johnson’s poems share many qualities with his occasional verse, written for friends to mark personal events, sometimes satirically, more often affectionately. The Vanity offers readers Johnson’s verse at its most powerful, unsparing in its renditions of the human condition, giving common language a vivid and almost terrifying concrete particularity.

This chapter contributes to the debates about Samuel Johnson’s politics by considering the inadequacy of “Tory” as a label as balanced by Johnson’s unique contribution to the British public sphere in light of his determination to oppose aggressive forms of cultural nationalism. Considering Johnson’s journalism, his critical biographies, and Rasselas, Hawes explores Johnson’s deliberate cultivation of an anti-colonial perspective that burst through the usual framework for public discussions of the Seven Years War. In opposing the “Whig interpretation of history,” Johnson set himself against the principal vector of expansionist ideology. In his ability to combine anti-slavery and anti-colonial positions, Hawes argues, Johnson is uniquely prescient – and sometimes politically quite radical. His politics need to be understood as specifically anti-colonial, often reframing discussions of supposedly national affairs as manifestations of a colonial agenda.

The chapter opens by considering Johnson’s seemingly hostile attitude to the eighteenth-century novel and its realistic portrayals of human life, as contrasted with that of his contemporary Henry Fielding. It places The Rambler’s theoretical strictures on such writing alongside Johnson’s views on biography and practice as a writer of fiction in Rasselas, eliciting his various contradictory opinions on representing bad characters and negative examples in literature. The chapter shows how, for Johnson, human imagination is both dangerous – competing with truth for control of the human psyche – and a positive source of creative energy. Fiction is sometimes therefore synonymous, in his mind, with falsehood and unreality. But it is also synonymous with literature of all kinds, and with the human endeavor to depict the world and other people in strikingly new and powerful ways that may, paradoxically, “awaken us to things as they are.”

This chapter considers how Samuel Johnson’s various disabilities shaped perceptions of him during his lifetime and continue to influence critical and biographical assessments of his personality, conversational prowess, and literary style. Given that modern conceptions of disability formed in the nineteenth century, I discuss why interpretations of Johnson’s mental and physical impairments might be better served by focusing on terms that were current in the eighteenth century, such as melancholy and peculiarity. Johnson’s friends and associates frequently commented on the “peculiarity” of his bodily movements. I examine episodes in which these peculiarities inspired people to stare at Johnson or to imitate him. These episodes reveal the deeper significance that eighteenth-century men and women ascribed to unusual and surprising forms of embodiment. I conclude by exploring the intriguing connections critics have made between Johnson’s “peculiar” body and his distinctive prose style.

This discussion of “Johnson and the essay” analyzes Johnson’s relationship with the essay – both his own idea of the essay and as compared with others’ practice in the form. After showing that the spirit of the essay is pervasive within Johnson’s writings and not confined to his major periodicals, the argument focuses on the special case of the periodical essay and draws attention to the moral and philosophical pertinence of The Rambler (Johnson’s “pure wine”), taking examples from his serious and comic modes. The account concludes by examining the experience of Johnson’s singular style and the fit between individual essays and the shape and meaning of the succession of papers overall. If Johnson’s essays do not resemble those of Michel de Montaigne in temper or structure, they are, in the case of The Rambler, a single-handed intellectual project of a similar order and a comparable endeavor in the art of self-founding.

Despite having the reputation of a misogynist for most of the twentieth century, Samuel Johnson has gradually been recognized as perhaps one of the most progressive male writers on the topic of women’s education. What does this say about Johnson’s position on gender? A cross-genre analysis of Johnson’s writing – dictionary entries, periodical essays, the verse tragedy Irene, the philosophical oriental tale Rasselas, and the critical biography of John Milton in the Lives of the Poets – demonstrates that while Johnson was certainly situated within the heteronormative framework characteristic of eighteenth-century England, and while his Christian chauvinism made his defense of Christian women (and Christian men) not fully intersectional, his defense of women as moral agents was a resource and reinforcement for eighteenth-century women writers.

Representing Samuel Johnson, whose towering intellect and larger than life persona dominated his era, posed a challenge for portrait painters and caricaturists alike. His public image, which coalesced over several decades, has continued to mutate and proliferate long after his death. Expanding the idea of serial portraiture, this chapter examines pairs or clusters of related images across various artists and media, focusing on the formative function of Johnson’s portraits in and after life and their central role in mythologizing him as a literary colossus. This chapter is particularly interested in tracing how visual representations of Johnson morphed over time, were appropriated and reproduced, and interacted dialogically, creating a kaleidoscopic, multifaceted, complex portrait of Johnson. As his close ties with artists, his support of artistic institutions, his print collection, and his collaboration in the creation of numerous portraits amply demonstrate, Johnson was not the ignorant philistine disinterested in his image that he at times

professed to be.