Johnson's Critical Presence

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"Samuel Johnson remains one of the most frequently discussed and cited of the eighteenth-century critics; but historians of criticism have invariably interpreted his work within conventions that have allowed for little evaluative commerce between the needs of the critical present and the voices of the critical past." "In Johnson's Critical Presence Smallwood offers a new account of Johnson's major critical writings conceived according to a different kind of historical potential. He suggests that the historicization of eighteenth-century criticism can best be understood in the light of the 'dialogic' and 'translational' historiographies of Collingwood, Gadamer and Ricoeur, and that the explanatory contexts of Johnson's criticism must include poetry in addition to theory; in this his study seeks to displace both the history of ideas as the leading paradigm for the history of criticism and to question the developmental narrative on which it relies."--Jacket.