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3 results

  • Introduction

  • Philip Smallwood, Birmingham City University
  • Book:
    The Literary Criticism of Samuel Johnson
    Published online:
    07 September 2023
    Print publication:
    21 September 2023, pp 1-14

  • Summary

    The Introduction offers a rationale for the first general analysis for a number of years of Samuel Johnson’s literary criticism. It sets forth the distinctive emphasis of the new volume and justifies its focus on Johnson’s “criteria of the heart.” This formulation points to the emotional foundation for many of Johnson’s literary judgments. How Johnson’s emotional demands count as criteria is then explained and the connection between the chapters is spelled out. Each explores Johnson’s critical artistry or aspects of his thought – the application of philosophical rigor to statements of critical opinion. The Introduction stresses the poetical character of Johnson’s critical prose and looks forward to the prose of the Lives of the Poets; a passage from this work has served as the basis for David Ferry’s poetical recreation of Johnson. The introductory excursus suggests that categories commonly employed to explain Johnson’s criticism in historical terms will always strike the wrong note. They make unwarranted assumptions about the nature and progress of criticism and disfigure our sense of Johnson’s place within critical history.

The Literary Criticism of Samuel Johnson
  • Forms of Artistry and Thought
  • Philip Smallwood
  • Published online:
    07 September 2023
    Print publication:
    21 September 2023
  • For Samuel Johnson, poetical judgments were no mere exercise in dry evaluation; rather, they reflected deep emotional responsiveness. In this provocative study, Philip Smallwood argues for experiencing Johnson's critical texts as artworks in their own right. The criticism, he suggests, often springs from emotional sources of great personal intensity and depth, inspiring translation of criticism into poetry and channelling prose's poetic potential. Through consideration of other critics, Smallwood highlights singularities in Johnson's judgments and approach, showing how such judgments are irreducible to philosophical doctrines. 'Ideas', otherwise the material of criticism's propensity to systems and theories, exist for Johnson as feelings that 'slumber in the heart.' Revealing Johnson's humour and intellectual reach, Smallwood frames his criticism in unresolved ironies of time and forms of historical change. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

  • 1 - The late Roman Empire from the Antonines to Constantine

  • from I - Philosophy in the later Roman Empire
  • Edited by Lloyd P. Gerson, University of Toronto
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity
    Published online:
    28 May 2011
    Print publication:
    01 January 2000, pp 13-24

  • Summary

    Late antique philosophy grew out of the mé'lange of cultures and traditions flourishing during the Augustan pax Romana. It took its quintessential attributes in the pressures besetting the late Roman Empire, and it quietly came to an end when the Mediterranean no longer linked but divided the shores it washed, becoming a barrier separating the Islamic Abbasids, the Byzantines and the Frankish empire. According to the church historian Eusebius of Caesarea, when the long period of republican civil strife found its resolution in the principate of Augustus, 'old dissensions' and 'national' boundaries disappeared, and ideas then spread easily throughout an empire at peace. Eusebius was referring to Christianity, of course. Numenius, Apuleius' contemporary, even more vividly represents philosophical trends under the Antonines. The failure of the persecution to turn Romans against Christianity shifted power away from the group favouring sacrifice, and provided favourable conditions, not only for the rise of Constantine, but for the empire's acceptance of Christian rule.