ENGL 321
Samuel Johnson and the Literary Tradition
Last Offered Spring 2024
Division I
This course is not offered in the current catalog

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) has been exceptionally influential not only because he was a distinguished writer of poems, essays, criticism, and biographies, but also because he was the first true historian of English literature, the first who sought to define its “tradition.” We will read Johnson’s own works and James Boswell’s Life of Johnson to discover Johnson’s talents, tastes, and standards as an artist, as a moral and literary critic, and as a man. We next will use Johnson’s Preface to Shakespeare and Lives of the Poets to examine how this great intelligence assessed writers from the Renaissance through the eighteenth century. While reading his commentary on Shakespeare and his critical biographies of Milton, Dryden, Pope, and Gray, we will analyze selected works by these writers so as to evaluate Johnson’s views and sharpen our understanding of the relationship between his standards and values, and the ones we hold today–both individually and collectively.