Samuel Johnson and the Life of Reading (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Robert DeMaria
- First Published: 1997
- Type of Work: Literary criticism
- Time of Work: 1709-1997
- Setting: Great Britain
- Principal Characters: Samuel Johnson
- Genres: Criticism, Nonfiction
- Subjects: Authors or writers, Literature, Communication, Depression, mental, Reading, Bible, biblical imagery, or biblical symbolism, Newspapers, Humanism, Computers, Encyclopedias or dictionaries
- Locales: Great Britain
In Printing Technology, Letters, and Samuel Johnson (1987), Alvin Kernan argued that “Samuel Johnson . . . lived out, in an intense and dramatic manner, the social mutation of writers from an earlier role as gentleman-amateurs to a new authorial self based on the realities of print and its conditions of mechanical reproduction.” Kernan thus uses Johnson as a synecdoche for eighteenth century authorship. The social mutations of authors resulted from changes in readership, which expanded in the 1700’s. Robert DeMaria, Jr., who has written a biography of Johnson and a study of...
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