The Achievement of Samuel Johnson

by Walter Jackson Bate

Book Overview

Book by W. Jackson Bate This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195004760
• Release Date: October 1955
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A profound appreciation of the great Cham of English Literature

Walter Jackson Bate shows in this work a deep understanding and appreciation of both the life and the work of Samuel Johnson. Though on the biographical side the work is prelude to the great biography of Johnson by Bate which will appear twenty years later, in evaluating the work itself this book is supreme. I especially appreciated Bate's long last chapter on Johnson as critic in which he outlines fully Johnson's understanding of the meaning and function of Literature. Bate in this shows how Johnson takes the neo-classical conception of rules and decorum and expands it so as to include within the realm of the highest literature, the work of Shakespeare. Bate focuses on the tremendous love of variety and multitudiousness which Johnson was moved by. He sees Johnson as one who though in some ways paradoxical in his relation to Literature nonetheless always affirmed that the worst thing a book could be is ' tedious' . Bate shows how Johnson in writing ' Lives of the Poets' could not confine himself to the biographical only and read the Literature deep into the Life. Bate writes that for Johnson the principal function of literature is to 'instruct by pleasing'. The growth in awareness, the process of enlightentment, is not apart from the process of 'pleasing' but rather by reason of it. So the generality that we want in literature- any meaning, order, or point-is not apart from the details that appeal to both 'familiarity' and 'novelty' but rather a deepening and clarification that proceeds by both of them'.

Wonderful introduction to Johnson's major themes.

.Walter Jackson Bate is famous for his biography of Johnson, but 20 years earlier he wrote this gem, which collects the major themes in Johnson's essays, and ties together the points Johnson made on them. It is not a quotation collection, it is Bate's analysis of the themes. There is a biographical chapter, but then about 150 pages of analysis. Those chapters are called:1. The hunger of imagination2. The treachery of the human heart and the strategems of defense3. The stability of truth4. Johnson as a critic: the form and function of literatureThis is a great companion volume for readers of Johnson's essays and criticism.