Samuel Johnson: Literature, Religion and English Cultural Politics from the Restoration to Romanticism

by J.C.D. Clark

This book offers an analysis of the life and thought of Samuel Johnson from a historian's viewpoint, which reverses the orthodoxy that has dominated the subject for over thirty years. J.C.D. Clark presents here a Johnson strikingly different from the apolitical, pragmatic and eccentric figure who emerges from the pages of most students of English literature. Johnson's commitments and conflicts in religion and politics are reconstructed; his role in the literary dynamics of his age is revealed against a new context for English cultural politics between the Restoration and the age of Romanticism.

288 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Jonathan Charles Douglas Clark is the Joyce C. and Elizabeth Ann Hall Distinguished Professorship of British History Emeritus at the University of Kansas. He received his undergraduate degree at Downing College, Cambridge and prior to his move to Kansas in 1996 he taught at Peterhouse, Cambridge and All Souls College, Oxford.

Reviews

[Alvaro de Menard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Extraordinarily well researched, but a bit dull and intensely focused on a minute area, with little regard for the bigger picture. Not really for the general reader. Jacobitism, nonjurors, presbyterianism, catholicism, anglicanism, oaths of loyalty, whigs vs tories, political pamphlets, and so on.