Community and Solitude: New Essays on Johnson’s Circle

Samuel Johnson’s life was situated within a rich social and intellectual community of friendships-and antagonisms. Community and Solitude is a collection of ten essays that explores relationships between Johnson and several of his main contemporaries-including James Boswell, Edmund Burke, Frances Burney, Robert Chambers, Oliver Goldsmith, Bennet Langton, Arthur Murphy, Richard Savage, Anna Seward, and Thomas Warton-and analyzes some of the literary productions emanating from the pressures within those relationships. In their detailed and careful examination of particular works situated within complex social and personal contexts, the essays in this volume offer a thick and illuminating description of Johnson’s world that also engages with larger cultural and aesthetic issues, such as intertextuality, literary celebrity, narrative, the nature of criticism, race, slavery, and sensibility.