The Literary Career of James Boswell, Esq., Being the Bibliographical Materials for a Life of Boswell

1930 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 488
Author(s):  
John Wilks ◽  
Frederick Albert Pottle
Keyword(s):  
James Boswell

JAMES BOSWELL

1972 ◽  
Vol 19 (5) ◽  
pp. 183-b-183
Author(s):  
IRMA S. LUSTIG
Keyword(s):  
James Boswell

Letters of James Boswell

1926 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 71
Author(s):  
Raymond D. Havens ◽  
Chauncey B. Tinker
Keyword(s):  
James Boswell

Literary Leviathans

2019 ◽  
pp. 123-155
Author(s):  
John Owen Havard
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
Literary Authority ◽  
Literature And Politics ◽  
James Boswell ◽  
Authorial Persona ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The French Revolution

This chapter shows how Samuel Johnson’s authorial persona focalized a larger crisis of political and literary authority during the period spanning the American War and the French Revolution. Where Johnson’s commitment to absolute sovereignty set him at odds with changing conceptions of power, the ‘warm Toryism’ of James Boswell allowed him to navigate the onset of Britain’s counter-revolutionary turn and its imperial correlatives with far greater success. These changing conceptions of authority converged in Boswell’s monumental biography, which thereby illuminates crucial changes to the relationship between literature and politics. Through Johnson’s reputation in America and posthumous satires about his views on popular revolution, the chapter shows how Johnson’s dogmatic views on authority, together with his volatile personality, infused both his writings and his politics with uncertainty. Boswell’s depiction of Johnson in his 1791 Life of Johnson in turn acquired heightened and transformed significance amidst fears of anti-royalist unrest and the explosion of plebeian political activity associated with the aftermath of the French Revolution, and, to an important and neglected degree, was the product of both this changing political atmosphere and changing conceptions of the literary domain.

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