Description: Volume 24 features commentary on a range of Johnsonian topics: his reaction to Milton, his relation to the Allen family, his notes in his edition of Shakespeare, his use of Oliver Goldsmith in his Dictionary, and his always fascinating Nachleben. The volume also includes articles on topics of strong interest to Johnson: penal reform, Charlotte Lennox's professional literary career, and the "conjectural history" of Homer in the eighteenth century.
Review Quotes: "The era that included Johnson and the epoch that Johnson defined: Both versions of The Age of Johnson merge, mingle, and happily marry in the long-awaited revival of Jack Lynch's and John Scanlan's acclaimed journal. Much as 'Dr. Johnson' refracts human experience through the zoom lens of biography, so this first volume from Bucknell University Press peers at the glorious spectrum of eighteenth-century culture through prismatic particularities. Readers of The Age of Johnson will watch with joy and amazement as able authors extract vibrant insights from such gems in the Enlightenment lode as Johnson's notes to Shakespeare or Hester Piozzi's verse annotations or even a few dusty portraits of John Milton hanging in a corner of 'the Great Cham's' powder room. Past, present, singular, and universal converge in inventive studies of Johnson's place on twentieth-century reading lists, of penal reform, and of Enlightenment notions concerning the identity of epic poet Homer. Johnson recommends that learners scan the world from China to Peru--from Lima to Lisbon and on to Beijing--but Johnson is here outdone by a truly global journal that even includes comments on Pacific explorer James Cook. Energized by snappy reviews and enriched by diligently full-length review essays, the newly upgraded Age of Johnson delivers lively, precise, and, above all, pioneering scholarship. It brings out the best in that select cadre of writers, thinkers, and occasionally even landscapers who, year after year and century after century, refresh and redefine the English Enlightenment."--Kevin L. Cope "editor of 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era"