The Age of Johnson

A Scholarly Annual (Volume 24)

Jack Lynch and J. T. Scanlon (Eds.)

2021
252 pages
$150.00
ISBN 9781684483013
The Age of Johnson

The move to a new publisher has given The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual the opportunity to recommit to what it does best: present to a wide readership cant-free scholarly articles and essays and searching book reviews, all featuring a wide variety of approaches, written by both seasoned scholars and relative newcomers. Volume 24 features commentary on a range of Johnsonian topics: his reaction to Milton, his relation to the Allen family, his notes in his edition of Shakespeare, his use of Oliver Goldsmith in his Dictionary, and his always fascinating Nachleben. The volume also includes articles on topics of strong interest to Johnson: penal reform, Charlotte Lennox's professional literary career, and the "conjectural history" of Homer in the eighteenth century.

For more than two decades, The Age of Johnson has presented a vast corpus of Johnsonian studies "in the broadest sense," as founding editor Paul J. Korshin put it in the preface to Volume 1, and it has retained the interest of a wide readership. In thousands of pages of articles, review essays, and reviews, The Age of Johnson has made a permanent contribution to our understanding of the eighteenth century, and particularly of Samuel Johnson, his circle, and his interests, and has also served as an outlet for writers who are not academics but have something important to say about the eighteenth century.

ISSN 0884-5816.

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Reviews

"I am sure that many of the readers of the Intelligencer will find many things of interest in this distinguished collation. AJ has been missing from the academic scene for far too long...AJ, welcome back. It's good to see you again."
-The Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer, October 2021

"Dedicated to publishing the best scholarship on Johnson and the long eighteenth century, The Age of Johnson has carved out a unique place for itself. The unusual amount of space allowed enables contributors to address in depth every facet of Johnson's work and life from his prayers to his politics (while not ignoring the wider aspects of the age) and the extensive review articles consistently engage with their subject matter at a level which is not possible elsewhere."
-Michael Bundock, author of The Fortunes of Francis Barber: The True Story of the Jamaican Slave Who Became Samuel Johnson's Heir

"Energized by snappy reviews and enriched by diligently full-length review essays, the newly upgraded Age of Johnson delivers lively, precise, and, above all, pioneering scholarship. It brings out the best in that select cadre of writers, thinkers, and occasionally even landscapers who, year after year and century after century, refresh and redefine the English Enlightenment."
-Kevin L. Cope, editor of 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era

About the editors:

Jack Lynch is a professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark and a Johnson scholar, having studied the great lexicographer for nearly a decade. He is the author of The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson and the editor of A Bibliography of Johnsonian Studies, 1986-1998. He has also written journal articles and scholarly reviews addressing Johnson and the eighteenth century.

J.T. Scanlan has written extensively on various aspects of the eighteenth century, including many essays on Samuel Johnson. Recent work on Johnson and law has appeared in Samuel Johnson after 300 Years, Samuel Johnson in Context, and Impassioned Jurisprudence. He's currently writing a book on legal issues, A Spirit of Contradiction: Law and Literature in Eighteenth-Century London. In a more popular vein, he's making final changes to a comic-grim memoir about grad school at the University of Michigan and Yale, Terminal Degree: My Quest for a Ph.D.

Distributed by Rutgers University Press

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