Reconsidering Biography

Contexts, Controversies, and Sir John Hawkins's Life of Johnson

By (author) Martine Watson Brownley Contributions by O M Brack, Martine W. Brownley Goodrich C. White Professor of English at Emory University and Director of, Greg Clingham, Timothy Erwin, Christopher D. Johnson, Thomas Kaminski, Myron D. Yeager

Publication date:

10 November 2011

Length of book:

196 pages

Publisher

Bucknell University Press

Dimensions:

239x162mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9781611483833

As part of the Samuel Johnson tercentenary commemoration, the University of Georgia Press published the first full scholarly edition of Sir John Hawkins’s Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1787). From its inception, Hawkins’s work, arising from a close relationship with Johnson that spanned over forty-five years, challenged certain adulatory views of Johnson and has continued to raise interesting critical questions about both Johnsonian biography and the genre of biography generally. Reconsidering Biography collects new essays that explore Hawkins’s biography of Johnson within its historical, political, legal, and personal contexts. More particularly, this volume considers how Hawkins’s approach to recording the Life of Johnson opens up broader questions about early modern biography and its relationship with eighteenth-century trends in aesthetics, politics, and historiography. These sophisticated and informed essays on a curious and often vexed friendship, and its literary offspring, supply a colorful and expansive view of the role of life-writing in the eighteenth-century literary imagination.

Chapter 1 Acknowledgements
Chapter 2 Abbreviations and Short Titles
Chapter 3 Introdcution: Why Hawkins?
Chapter 4 Re-Assesing Sir John Hawkins's The Life of Samuel Johnson, L.L.D.: Some Reflections
Part 5 Part One: Sir John Hawkins and the Developement of English Biography
Chapter 6 A Rhetoric of Truth and Instruction: Hawkins's The Life of Samuel Johnson, L.L.D., and Eighteenth-Century Biographical Practice
Chapter 7 Hawkins and Biography as a Genre
Chapter 8 Hawkin's The Life of Samuel Johnson, L.L.D., and Modern Biographies
Part 9 Part Two: Sir John Hawkins's Johnson and His Contexts
Chapter 10 Sir John Hawkins on Richard Savage and the Profession of Authorship
Chapter 11 From Bigotry to Genius: The Treatment of Johnson's Poltics in Hawkins's The Life of Samuel Johnson, L.L.D.
12 Hawkin's Biography, and the Law
Chapter 13 Bibliography
Chapter 14 Notes on Contributors

Reconsidering Biography splendidly illuminates an unjustly neglected eighteenth-century literary figure, musicologist, editor, and biographer Sir John Hawkins. Martine Watson Brownley oversees a collection of essays penned by a distinguished collection of contributors who focus primarily upon Hawkins' most enduring contribution to British literature, his Life of Johnson-an important study that has been historically eclipsed by Boswell's Life of Johnson. The momentum generated by these crisp and luminous essays, in combination with the recent publication of O M Brack's critical edition of Hawkins' Life of Johnson, should stimulate a revival of critical interest in Hawkins.