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Facts and Inventions: Selections from the Journalism of James Boswell

James Boswell

Paul Tankard (ed.)

James Boswell (1740–1795), best known as the biographer of Samuel Johnson, was also a lawyer, journalist, diarist, and an insightful chronicler of a pivotal epoch in Western history. This book ... More

James Boswell (1740–1795), best known as the biographer of Samuel Johnson, was also a lawyer, journalist, diarist, and an insightful chronicler of a pivotal epoch in Western history. This book presents a generous and varied selection of Boswell's journalistic writings, most of which have not been published since the eighteenth century. It offers a new angle on the history of journalism, an idiosyncratic view of literature, politics, and public life in late eighteenth-century Britain, and an original perspective on a complex and engaging literary personality.Less

Johnson and Boswell: A Biography of Friendship

John Radner

This book examines the fluctuating, close, and complex friendship enjoyed by Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, from the day they met in 1763 to the day when Boswell published his monumental Life of ... More

This book examines the fluctuating, close, and complex friendship enjoyed by Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, from the day they met in 1763 to the day when Boswell published his monumental Life of Johnson. Drawing on everything Johnson and Boswell wrote to and about the other, it charts the psychological currents that flowed between them as they scripted and directed their time together, questioned and advised, confided and held back. The book explores the key longings and shifting tensions that distinguished this from each man's other long-term friendships, while it tracks in detail how Johnson and Boswell brought each other to life, challenged and confirmed each other, and used their deepening friendship to define and assess themselves. It tells a story that reaches through its specificity into the dynamics of most sustained friendships, with their breaks and reconnections, their silences and fresh intimacies, their continuities and transformations.Less

Novel Beginnings: Experiments in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction

Patricia Spacks

This study provides an account of the early history of the English novel. It departs from the traditional, narrow focus on the development of the realistic novel to emphasize the many kinds of ... More

This study provides an account of the early history of the English novel. It departs from the traditional, narrow focus on the development of the realistic novel to emphasize the many kinds of experimentation that marked the genre in the eighteenth century before its conventions were firmly established in the nineteenth. Treating well-known works such as Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy in conjunction with less-familiar texts such as Sarah Fielding's The Cry (a kind of hybrid novel and play) and Jane Barker's A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (a novel of adventure replete with sentimental verse and numerous subnarratives), the book evokes the excitement of a multifaceted and unpredictable process of growth and change. Investigating fiction throughout the 1700s, the author delineates the individuality of specific texts while suggesting connections among novels. She sketches a wide range of forms and themes, including Providential narratives, psychological thrillers, romans à clef, sentimental parables, political allegories, Gothic romances, and many others. These multiple narrative experiments, the author shows, demonstrate the impossibility of thinking of eighteenth-century fiction simply as a precursor to the nineteenth-century novel. Instead, the vast variety of engagements with the problems of creating fiction illustrates that literary history—by no means inexorable—might have taken quite a different course.Less

Obsolete Objects in the Literary Imagination: Ruins, Relics, Rarities, Rubbish, Uninhabited Places, and Hidden Treasures

Francesco Orlando

Translated here into English is a work of literary history and criticism comparable in scope and achievement to Eric Auerbach's Mimesis. The author explores Western literature's obsession with ... More

Translated here into English is a work of literary history and criticism comparable in scope and achievement to Eric Auerbach's Mimesis. The author explores Western literature's obsession with outmoded and nonfunctional objects (ruins, obsolete machinery, broken things, trash, etc.). Combining the insights of psychoanalysis and literary-political history, he traces this obsession to a turning point in history, at the end of eighteenth-century industrialization, when the functional became the dominant value of Western culture. Roaming through every genre and much of the history of Western literature, the author identifies distinct categories into which obsolete images can be classified and provides myriad examples. The function of literature, he concludes, is to remind us of what we have lost and what we are losing as we rush toward the future.Less