This chapter discusses an underexplored and relatively unappreciated, but essential, aspect of Samuel Johnson’s writing and thinking: his intellectual relationship with Renaissance humanism. Looking at representative figures such as Sir Thomas More, Sir Francis Bacon, and Michel de Montaigne, Lee explores the influence these writers and thinkers had upon Johnson, describing his lifelong interest in the kinds of scholarly works for which they were known (dictionary, scholarly edition, biography, satire, skeptical essay) and also detecting their presence in Johnson’s moral and philosophical commitment to an “active” life, and even in his very prose style. In so doing so, the chapter concludes that Johnson embraced Renaissance humanism while simultaneously adapting it into a project relevant and responsive to the demands of his own day and age – and, indeed, suggesting a model for our own potential humanism today.

This chapter interrogates critical commonplaces about Johnson’s use of and approaches to language, engaging both with lexicography and the making of Johnson’s celebrated Dictionary (1st ed., 1755), alongside his thinking on language more widely. Johnson’s interest in empiricism and data collection, alongside his deployment of metaphors of slavery and contested power, shed light on his lexicographical method, as does his innovative decision to include letters and letter-writing as a productive source of information, especially of “ordinary” use. His engagement with register and contextual use, with the intricacies of connotation alongside denotation, and with loanwords (and their influence on processes of change and assimilation) document an approach dominated not by rigidity and stasis but by a wide-ranging commitment to a language that, then and now, was marked by its “exuberance of signification.”

Johnson’s stand against prejudice is reflected in the critical and editorial aspects of his “Shakespeare.” His editions contain the distinguished Preface and notes and express Johnson’s dialogue with earlier editions. This chapter considers Johnson on the methods of Pope, Theobald, Hanmer, and Warburton and suggests the collaborative nature of Johnson’s contributions. Defending “the dull duty of an editor,” Johnson concedes the task is impossible, and his later editions display second thoughts, generally favoring conservative readings. Johnson’s notes are varied and clarify meanings through paraphrase, with examples from Measure for Measure and Othello, the latter exemplifying Johnson’s sensitivity to female suffering. The central criterion of Johnson’s criticism – “general nature” – is then addressed. The essay concludes with detailed analysis of the death of Cardinal Beaufort from Henry VI Part 2, a scene heavily marked up by Johnson in his Warburton and described as “scarcely the work of any pen but Shakespeare’s.”

From his earliest publications in the 1730s, Johnson expressed unwavering abhorrence of slavery as well as antagonism to the racial division of humankind. Even with the rise of abolitionist writing in the 1760s, however, Johnson’s public statements on these issues are scattered through several works or recorded by Boswell in the Life of Johnson, who himself opposed the abolition of the slave trade. We can explain Johnson’s failure to intervene more fully and publicly in the debate over slavery by considering that he feared connections between abolitionism and extensions of “human rights” to a broader platform of political reform. His longest statement on the status of slaves in Britain in Boswell’s Life is carefully worded and legally narrow compared with the more sweeping condemnations of slavery in contemporary abolitionist publications. On the issue of “race,” however, Johnson remained committed to the idea of the common and equal humanity of all people.

Samuel Johnson’s lifelong interest in travel and travel writing aligns neatly, in many ways, with his empiricist metaphysics. When we travel, we compare our assumptions and preconceptions against the real world and track the inevitable incongruities. But Johnson’s enduring interest in travel also reveals a more complex engagement with the material world – and Lockean empiricism more broadly – than we often recognize, and his attitude toward the genre is more complicated, more critical and probing, than we might expect. With reference primarily to Rasselas and A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, this chapter examines how Johnson leverages travel to combat habituation; enable comparative knowledge, which produces meaning and value; and assess our bodies and minds as we perceive, digest, and retain knowledge. Facilitating a comparative intellectual paradigm, and foregrounding epistemology, travel is, for Johnson, a critical posture that underpins his thinking far beyond his travel texts.

Assessing the relationships between Johnson’s attitudes toward history and historical writing and British historiographical conditions during the first half of the eighteenth century can offer useful perspectives on his sometimes contradictory views. For Johnson, many of the problems in contemporary British historiography, ranging from the ubiquity of inadequate compilations to the strikingly overt politicization of all historical writing at the time, involved questions of authorial control. To enlarge the truncated narratives and expand the scope of the kinds of histories Johnson saw being written by his contemporaries, he turned to forms of social and cultural history, along with parahistorical genres such as memoir and biography, in order to engage the increased readership for historical writing during the period. Although Johnson’s thought characteristically generalizes, his negativity about historical writing can often be understood in more specific terms, as reactions to the contemporary situation in British historiography.

This chapter addresses the question of Johnson’s ethical thought and argues that it is in and through his balanced, subtle, and refined writings that we most see it in play. The piece summons Johnson’s own definition of ethics in his Preface to the Preceptor, an educational work written for the publisher Robert Dodsley (1748), and finds in the work of three thinkers – Isaac Watts, William Law, and Cicero – strong influential strands of thought that offered him both Christian and classical models for how humans should behave toward their fellow-beings. Johnson put in play questions of ethical behavior in his periodical writings, allowing him to present complex moral dilemmas from the multiple angles needed to encompass them. The chapter, taking up a hint from John Sitter, summons an ethical Johnson who might help us face twenty-first century problems with grace and inclusivity.

This “guided tour” of the Lives of the Poets explores Johnson’s criteria for poetry, starting from his discussion of the metaphysical poets. What Johnson says about Gray’s Elegy is related to the commemorative impulse in the Lives. The ironic vision of the Life of Savage is argued to underlie that comedic understanding of the complex relation between writing and life that frequently surfaces elsewhere. Four major writers then get special attention, in which literary appreciation and quasi-personal relationship go hand in hand. Johnson’s intensely held ambivalence about Paradise Lost pays reluctant tribute to Milton’s own capaciousness of mind. Swift’s rigor toward himself and others is met by Johnson’s correspondingly acerbic, unforgiving account. Dryden’s roving, fluid, omni-curious intelligence, his hospitality to the occasional and contingent, is matched by the relaxed generosity and miscellaneousness of Johnson’s Life of Dryden, as contrasted with the careful scrutiny afforded to the life and work of the self-aware, self-critical, aspiring Pope.

The chapter examines Walt Whitman’s and Frances Harper’s engagements with vernacular forms, especially ballad stanza and dialect verse, in their Reconstruction-era poetry. For both poets, using such forms marked a departure from usual practice. Whitman turned to the familiar ballad form in moments of national uncertainty, particularly addressing the president’s assassination and issues of race during Reconstruction. The ballad’s conventional racialization of voice, however, represented a challenge for Harper. Before the war, Harper worked primarily in the elevated register of standard written English. Her Aunt Chloe poems, originating in her tour of the south during Reconstruction, mark an important divergence from her earlier work and an important intervention into the ballad tradition. Here she brought a new vernacular voice to an old vernacular form.

This chapter examines contemporary and emerging developments in the literatures of the Civil War and Reconstruction. It argues that two particular genres have recently taken root: stories about people previously overlooked by mainstream accounts of the era; and stories that approach the Civil War and Reconstruction as a source of philosophical meaning. The chapter explores the major iterations of these burgeoning genres and documents their ongoing evolution in texts such as George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, Kasi Lemmons’s Harriet, Gary Ross’s Free State of Jones, and James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird.

This chapter examines Charles Chesnutt’s teaching career in the south during Reconstruction. Chesnutt left his work as a teacher in order to pursue a career in literature, primarily of fiction. The connection between Chesnutt’s stories and his experiences as a Black teacher in the south reveals a new story about Black education crucial to understanding the history of Reconstruction.

In a scathing November 2018 editorial published in The Guardian, public intellectual Rebecca Solnit connected a series of violent white supremacist acts in Charleston, Charlottesville, and Pittsburgh to the Civil War and Reconstruction. Writing with characteristic verve, Solnit concluded, “If you are white, you could consider that the Civil War ended in 1865. But the blowback against Reconstruction, the rise of Jim Crow, the myriad forms of segregation and deprivation of rights and freedoms and violence against black people, kept the population subjugated and punished into the present in ways that might as well be called war.”1 Solnit’s was in many ways a representative argument during the age of Donald Trump, whom Solnit deemed “an openly Confederate president.” In a moment of intense political division and social strife, many critics and commentators find themselves returning to this difficult period in American history in search of precedent.

Literature does not reflect history: it creates possible worlds. The literature of Reconstruction participated in national debates by imagining competing fictional worlds that could have emerged from controversial policies to reconcile former enemies while promoting rights for newly emancipated freedmen. Recent scholarship defines Reconstruction spatially as encompassing the nation, not just the south, and temporally as lasting from the middle of the Civil War to the advent of legalized segregation and disfranchisement in the early twentieth century. This chapter compares works structured by four emerging plots: stories about the Union as it was, romances between northerners and southerners, racial passing, and inheritance. These plots are not mutually exclusive. For instance, romances often have consequences for inheritance. Nonetheless, debates over what sort of nation should emerge from the blood of civil war come alive by comparing how these plots were fashioned in competing ways.