Samuel Johnson: The Major Works (Oxford World's Classics) |
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Samuel Johnson: The Major Works (Oxford World's Classics)
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by Samuel Johnson and Donald Greene
Sales Rank: 84690
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$7.77
At Amazon
on 6-17-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Paperback with 880 pages
Published by: Oxford University Press, USA; New Ed edition September 28, 2000
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 0192840428
ISBN 13 Number: 978-0192840424
Book Dimensions:
7.7 x 5.1 x 2.3 inches
Weighs: 1.2 pounds
Product Description
Samuel Johnson's literary reputation rests on such a varied output that he defies easy description: poet, critic, lexicographer, travel writer, essayist, editor, and, thanks to his good friend Boswell, the subject of one of the most famous English biographies.
This volume celebrates Johnson's amazing talent by selecting widely across the full range of his work. It includes "London" and "The Vanity of Human Wishes" among other poems, and many of his essays for the Rambler and Idler. The prefaces to his edition of Shakespeare and his famous Dictionary,
together with samples from the texts, are given, as well as selections from A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, the Lives of the Poets, and Rasselas in its entirety. There is also a substantial representation of lesser-known prose, and of his poetry, letters, and journals.
About The Author
The late Donald Greene was a Professor of English at University of Southern California
Reader Reviews
I read Johnson in the same way that I read Jane Austen, for the pure joy--and the celebration--of their beautifully balanced sentences. Indeed, it's almost like playing Bach to perform these sentences as they mount into paragraphs. One walks away feeling that one's thinking apparatus has been lovingly oiled, buffed, spun and polished. In addition, there's the incredible range of this man's thinking to applaud as well. However, the problem for some people might be that the book in question, with its generous selection and its easy-on-the eye type size, is roughly the same dimensions as Johnson's brain, and probably a tad heavier, which mitigates against taking it out for a stroll stuffed into the back pocket for an occasional dip. Instead it should be installed in the bedroom or the bathroom or any room where it can be consulted in an on-again, off-again manner. I read the Rambler selections, the dictionary and the poetry in this way. What's good about Johnson is that his prose is like poetry--it can't be read through just once, but demands re-reading, and each time offers yet another prize for the effort. Funny that it all came from a grotesque hypocrite and snob who enjoyed bullying others and was none too clean about his shirt and linen. Finally, brilliant as he was, I have to disagree with Johnson when he says, at the beginning of his Rambler Essay "The Need for General Knowledge" "That wonder is the effect of ignorance has been often observed....Wonder is a pause of reason, a sudden cessation of the mental progress, which lasts only while the understanding is fixed upon some single idea, and is at an end when it recovers force enough to divide the subject into its parts, or mark the intermediate gradations from the first agent to the last consequence...." (pg. 222 this book). The more I understand Johnson and his times, his parts and his divisions, the more I am struck with wonder.
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Samuel Johnson: The Major Works (Oxford World's Classics)
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Price: $7.77
Updated on 6-17-2008.
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