Community and Solitude

New Essays on Johnson's Circle

Anthony W. Lee

2019
270 pages
$34.95
ISBN 9781684480227
Transits

Samuel Johnson's life was situated within a rich social and intellectual community of friendships - and antagonisms. Community and Solitude is a collection of ten essays that
explores relationships between Johnson and several of his main contemporaries - including James Boswell, Edmund Burke, Frances Burney, Robert Chambers, Oliver Goldsmith, Bennet Langton, Arthur Murphy, Richard Savage, Anna Seward, and Thomas Warton - and analyzes some of the literary productions emanating from the pressures within those relationships. In their detailed and careful examination of particular works situated within complex social and personal contexts, the essays in this volume offer a "thick" and illuminating description of Johnson's world that also engages with larger cultural and aesthetic issues, such as intertextuality, literary celebrity, narrative, the nature of criticism, race, slavery, and sensibility.

Contributors: Christopher Catanese, James Caudle, Marilyn Francus, Christine Jackson-Holzberg, Claudia Thomas Kairoff, Elizabeth Lambert, Anthony W. Lee, James E. May, John Radner, and Lance Wilcox.

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Reviews

"As a monograph designed for considering the historical interconnectedness in readings of literature, history, and culture, Community and Solitude, part of Bucknell University Press's Transits series, accomplishes its goal with welcome fidelity."
- The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats, Spring 2021

"The collection includes scholarly arguments that create intertextual connections or new means to consider the eighteenth-century social world that are organically united by their shared concern about the nuances of these eighteenth-century relationships...[Community and Solitude] follow[s] closely in the tradition of Johnson scholars but remind[s] us that the richness of the record around this group of eighteenth-century lives is deep and illustrative of so many larger questions."
-Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Fall 2021

"These essays, well presented in this volume by Bucknell University Press, bring context, color, and an array of information that should prove of value to students and scholars of Johnson's expansive circle."
-Eighteenth-Century Studies

"Expertly compiled and deftly edited . . . An invaluable, erudite, thoughtful and thought provoking contribution to the study of Samuel Johnson's life, philosophy, and literary work, Community and Solitude: New Essays on Johnson's Circle is an extraordinary body of informative and deftly scripted scholarship."
- Midwest Book Review

"This volume of essays advances the field not only because it focuses on a new topic - the intersection of the themes of community and solitude in the writings of Samuel Johnson and those in his 'circle' - but also because of the patient and imaginative analysis in the various essays. The audience here extends beyond Johnsonians because so many other figures of interest are included, from Frances Burney, Burke, Warton, Seward, and Arthur Murphy to Goldsmith and of course Boswell."
- Steven Lynn, University of South Carolina

"The scholarship is of a consistently high level, and the prose is clear and well edited. Community and Solitude provides a salutary reminder that authorship is not always the solitary activity that many people assume. Recommend."
-Choice

"This collection of ten essays begins with three solid essays, all making good use of correspondence."
-Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer

"Lee, as editor, sets out to counterbalance Johnson's need for solitude to accomplish his literary works with his at times almost desperate search for company to alleviate his periods of despair and disillusion."
-The New Rambler

About the author:

Anthony W. Lee is an expert on Samuel Johnson and his circle, mentoring, and intertextuality. He has published more than forty essays on Johnson and eighteenth-century literature and culture, and six books, most recently New Essays on Samuel Johnson: Revaluation, Community and Solitude: New Essays on Johnson's Circle (Bucknell University Press), and "Modernity Johnson": Samuel Johnson Among the Modernists. He has taught at a number of colleges and universities, including the University of Arkansas, Kentucky Wesleyan College, the University of the District of Columbia, and the University of Maryland University College, where he also served as director of the English and humanities program. He is currently a visiting lecturer at Arkansas Tech University and lives in Dardanelle, Arkansas.

Distributed by Rutgers University Press

Cloth: $99.95, 978-1-6844-8023-4; EPUB: $34.95, 978-1-6844-8024-1