279 research outputs found
Boswell and Brydon
No full textBy the second half of the eighteenth century, the grand tour had been so frequently recounted that Boswell and Brydone both sought more remote corners of Italy. Boswell's usual irrepressible enthusiasm and undaunted effrontery secured him the acquaintance of Pascal Paoli, a freedom fighter of his day, while Boswell's published account (1768) earned for its author the life-long soubriquet of Corsican Boswell. Brydone dedicated his account to William Beckford, responsible for the fashion of picturesque tours, who had initially suggested Brydone visit Sicily:
I remember to have heard you regret, that in all your peregrinations through Europe, you had ever neglected the island of Sicily; and had spent much of your time in running over the old beaten track, and in examining the thread-bare subjects of Italy and France; when probably there were a variety of objects, not less interesting, that still lay buried in oblivion in that celebrated island. (1-2)
Brydone clearly identified the interesting objects, for his work went through more than 20 editions in his lifetime
Dancing in the Movies
No full textEncompassing a vast gamut of personalities, situations, and emotions, these stories penetrate our motives for doing what is right. Often there is no right or wrong and the characters\u27 motives for the choices they make are as diverse as the childhood memories they cherish and abhor. In the end, this book probes individual impulse and responsibility, creating stories so unerringly authentic that they become-irrepressibly- part of everyone who reads them.
The Darkness of Love narrates three days in the life of a black policeman, distressed by his inner fears of racism and irresistibly attracted by his wife\u27s sister. In Dancing in the Movies a college student returns to his hometown, where he finds his girlfriend—a heroin addict—and tries to convince her to overcome her habit. There are stories of men at war, of lovers trying to begin a relationship, of others trying to sustain their love. Each story revolves around characters with a choice to make, and Robert Boswell renders these characters in all of their fine, vulnerable, and relentless attributes.
With this prize-winning collection, Boswell proves himself a mature craftsperson, weaving stories both poignant and profound. Each story is a vision of life, alternately dark and joyous, gritty and hopeful.https://ir.uiowa.edu/uipress_isfa/1042/thumbnail.jp
“Corsica Boswell”: Ignominious Peace and Honourable War
No full textThe so-called Macaulayan formulation which turned James Boswell into “Corsica Boswell” has left its imprint in the realm of literary criticism. The label characterizes the author of An Account of Corsica, the Journal of a Tour to That lsland; and Memoirs of Pascal Paoli, published in 1768, as a somewhat histrionic, over-sensitive defender not only of the Corsican revolution of 1768-69 but of all preceding Corsican revolutions. Frederick A. Pottle, Boswell’s renowned biographer, defines such a..
James Boswell
No full textJames Boswell (1740-95) has gone down in history as the biographer of Samuel Johnson, a sexual adventurer, a toadying Scot, and as a writer who typified the divided consciousness of the Scottish eighteenth century. Before the discovery and (since 1950) publication of his private papers, critics often saw him as a bit of a fool, whose achievement was primarily that of being lucky enough to be the friend and amanuensis of the most famous Englishman of his day. More recently, the stature of Boswell’s achievement and his complexity as a writer have been better appreciated, but without adequate understanding of his role as a specifically Scottish author and thinker of the age of Enlightenment: in particular, his anxious critique of Humean scepticism is discussed here. This study examines, through a close reading of both published and unpublished materials, how Boswell deliberately sets out to write ambiguously about himself and the major events of his time; how, far from echoing Johnson, Boswell improves on his sayings and teasingly criticizes him; and how Boswell’s political and religious sympathies with Jacobitism, Scotland and Catholicism coloured the way in which he understood his own, and his country’s, uncertain place in the new world of British imperial opportunity. Murray Pittock is Professor of Scottish and Romantic Literature at the University of Manchester, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the English Association. He has previously held the Chair in Literature at the University of Strathclyde and been Reader in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh
Boswell and the Press: Essays on the Ephemeral Writing of James Boswell
No full textBoswell and the Press is the first sustained examination of James Boswell’s ephemeral writings—his journalism, pamphlets, and broadsides—which, taken together, prove worthy of critical study. These new essays enhance our comprehension of Boswell’s interests and proclivities as an author and refine our understanding of how the print environment in which he worked influenced what he wrote and how he wrote it. Contributors further illuminate a print culture in the throes of transformation, providing useful fodder for historians of journalism and publishing in eighteenth- century Britain, while offering up rich new material for seasoned Boswell scholars.https://digitalcommons.bucknell.edu/bucknell-press/1035/thumbnail.jp
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The Moral Philosophy of James Boswell
No full textIt is the purpose of the author to outline briefly some of the intellectual ideas relating to the nature of man, his conception of religion, his social manners and customs, and to reveal, through the "Hypochondriack" essays, that James Boswell was a peculiarly eighteenth-century figure in certain aspects of his moral philosophy
Boswell: Citizen of the World, Man of Letters
No full textThese eleven original essays by well-known eighteenth-century scholars, five of them editors of James Boswell’s journal or letters, commemorate the bicentenary of Boswell’s death on May 19, 1795. The volume illuminates both the life and the work of one of the most important literary figures of the age and contributes significantly to the scholarship on this rich period. In the introduction, Irma S. Lustig sets the tone for the volume. She reveals that the essays examining Boswell as “Citizen of the World are deliberately paired with those that analyze his artistic skills, to emphasize that “Boswell’s sophistication as a writer is inseparable from his cosmopolitanism.
The essays in Part I focus on the relationship of the Enlightenment, at home and abroad, to Boswell’s personal development. Marlies K. Danziger restores to significant life the continental philosophers and theologians Boswell consulted in his search for religious certainty. Peter Perreten examines Boswell’s enraptured study of Italian antiquity and his responses to the European landscape. Richard B. Sher and Perreten document the personal and aesthetic influence of Henry Home, Lord Kames, Scottish jurist and leading Enlightenment figure, on Boswell. Michael Fry discusses Boswell’s relationship with Henry Dundas, political manager for Scotland, and Thomas Crawford examines Boswell’s long-standing interest in the volatile political issues of the period, including the French Revolution, through his correspondence with William Johnson Temple. In evaluation Boswell’s performance as Laird of Auchinleck, John Strawhorn documents his efforts to improve the estate by use of new agricultural methods.
The essays in Part II study aspects of Boswell’s artistry in Life of Johnson, the magnum opus that set a standard for biography. Carey McIntosh examines Boswell’s use of rhetoric, and William P. Yarrow offers a close scrutiny of metaphor. Isobel Grundy invokes Virginia Woolf in demonstrating Boswell’s acceptance of uncertainty as a biographer. John B. Radner reveals Boswell’s self-assertive strategies in his visit with Johnson at Ashbourne in September 1777, and, finally, Lustig examines as a “subplot” of the biography Johnson’s patient efforts to win the friendship of Margaret Montgomerie Boswell. An appendix by Hitoshi Suwabe serves scholars by providing the most exact account to date of Boswell’s meetings with Johnson.
Irma S. Lustig is Research Associate in English at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the editorial board of the Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell. She is the author of more than thirty articles and review essays on Boswell, Johnson, and their circle.
Lustig\u27s collection of essays successfully supports the claims that Boswell\u27s Life of Johnson is more than a memory. As conscious artistry, it is a noble creation that evolves from the James Boswell who was a citizen of the world, a man of letters, and a product of the Enlightenment. —Albion
These essays set the standard against which future examinations of Boswell\u27s prose should be measured. —British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studieshttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_british_isles/1014/thumbnail.jp
Race, Ethnicity, and Place in a Changing America
No full textTerry-Ann Jones (with Thomas D. Boswell) is a contributing author, “The Distribution and Socioeconomic Status of West Indians Living in the United States”, pp. 155-180 [Part II, Chapter 13].https://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/sociologyandanthropology-books/1022/thumbnail.jp
The Cub, the Parson, the Doctor: James Boswell, Laurence Sterne, and Samuel Johnson in London
No full textSamuel Johnson (1709-1784) was the dominant literary figure of the later eighteenth century. He was most famed in his day as the author of the first comprehensive Dictionary of the English Language, but he would be eventually celebrated in equal measure as a great moral sage, essayist, poet, critic, conversationalist, and the second most quoted person in the English language after Shakespeare. Laurence Sterne (1713-1768) was an Irish-born Anglican clergyman who achieved instant celebrity as the author of one of the most wildly innovative comic novels in English, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Though the novel is now considered a key work in the evolution of the novel and a precursor to postmodernist experiments in self-reflexive writing, not every reader has responded favourably to its dizzying novelties. Samuel Johnson, who likely never met Sterne, notoriously if incorrectly predicted that the novel‘s popularity would fade. James Boswell (1740-1795) also aimed to become a great literary author of the period but his reputation did not fare as well as Johnson‘s or Sterne‘s. A generation after his death, he had come to be seen as a buffoon who had needled his way into the company of the powerful and talented while displaying little talent or with himself. The 19th-century essayist Lord Macaulay pronounced him “one of the smallest men who ever lived [...] a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect [...] shallow and pedantic, a bigot and a sot [...] a common butt in the taverns of London.” Yet Boswell kept meticulous records of his conversations with the eminent writers and thinkers of his age, and from these records were produced not only a remarkable series of journals, unmatched in their detail and directness, but equally one indisputable masterpiece, his Life of Johnson, which is generally regarded as the greatest biography in English. In this ambitious and exhaustively researched paper, Adria Young gathers pretty much all evidence available (and there‘s not much of it) connecting Sterne to Johnson, with Boswell emerging as a go-between connecting these two very different personalities. But more than showing how their lives may have intersected, Young develops a lively and suggestive argument about how Boswell, always in search of a father-figure, ultimately shed the exuberant Sterne‘s early influence in favour of Johnson‘s sturdier guidance. -Dr. Trevor Ros
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