Alfred David

Stephen Jay Greenblatt

Carol T. Christ

Lawrence Lipking

Barbara Kiefer Lewalski

The Norton Anthology of English Literature

He was a servant to the public, a writer for hire. He was a hero, an author adding to the glory of his nation. But can a writer be both hack and hero? The career of Samuel Johnson, recounted here by Lawrence Lipking, proves that the two can be one. And it further proves, in its enduring interest for readers, that academic fashions today may be a bit hasty in pronouncing the "death of the author." A book about the life of an author, about how an author is made, not born, Lipking's Samuel Johnson is the story of the man as he lived--and lives--in his work. Tracing Johnson's rocky climb from anonymity to fame, in the course of which he came to stand for both the greatness of English literature and the good sense of the common reader, the book shows how this life transformed the very nature of authorship. Beginning with the defiant letter to Chesterfield that made Johnson a celebrity, Samuel Johnson offers fresh readings of all the writer's major works, viewed through the lens of two ongoing preoccupations: the urge to do great deeds--and the sense that bold expectations are doomed to disappointment. Johnson steers between the twin perils of ambition and despondency. Mounting a challenge to the emerging industry that glorified and capitalized on Shakespeare, he stresses instead the playwright's power to cure the illusions of everyday life. All Johnson's works reveal his extraordinary sympathy with ordinary people. In his groundbreaking Dictionary, in his poems and essays, and in The Lives of the English Poets, we see Johnson becoming the key figure in the culture of literacy that reaches from his day to our own.

The Life of an Author

Samuel Johnson

Catherine R. Stimpson

Lawrence Lipking, PH D

At the heart of poetic tradition is a figure of abandonment, a woman forsaken and out of control. She appears in writings ancient and modern, in the East and the West, in high art and popular culture produced by women and by men. What accounts for her perennial fascination? What is her function—in poems and for writers? Lawrence Lipking suggests many possibilities. In this figure he finds a partial record of women's experience, an instrument for the expression of religious love and yearning, a voice for psychological fears, and, finally, a model for the poet. Abandoned women inspire new ways of reading poems and poetic tradition.

Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition

Katharine Eisaman Maus

George M. Logan

Stephen Greenblatt

Read by millions of students over seven editions, The Norton Anthology of English Literature remains the most trusted undergraduate survey of English literature available and one of the most successful college texts ever published.

The Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century has often been called a decisive turning point in human history. It represents, for good or ill, the birth of modern science and modern ways of viewing the world. In What Galileo Saw, Lawrence Lipking offers a new perspective on how to understand what happened then, arguing that artistic imagination and creativity as much as rational thought played a critical role in creating new visions of science and in shaping stories about eye-opening discoveries in cosmology, natural history, engineering, and the life sciences. When Galileo saw the face of the Moon and the moons of Jupiter, Lipking writes, he had to picture a cosmos that could account for them. Kepler thought his geometry could open a window into the mind of God. Francis Bacon's natural history envisioned an order of things that would replace the illusions of language with solid evidence and transform notions of life and death. Descartes designed a hypothetical "Book of Nature" to explain how everything in the universe was constructed. Thomas Browne reconceived the boundaries of truth and error. Robert Hooke, like Leonardo, was both researcher and artist; his schemes illuminate the microscopic and the macrocosmic. And when Isaac Newton imagined nature as a coherent and comprehensive mathematical system, he redefined the goals of science and the meaning of genius. What Galileo Saw bridges the divide between science and art; it brings together Galileo and Milton, Bacon and Shakespeare. Lipking enters the minds and the workshops where the Scientific Revolution was fashioned, drawing on art, literature, and the history of science to reimagine how perceptions about the world and human life could change so drastically, and change forever.

Imagining the Scientific Revolution

What Galileo Saw

M. H. Abrams's writings on the Romantics have had an incalculable influence on the literary history of his time. High Romantic Argument, treating as it does various aspects of Abrams's work, is in a sense an appraisal of that history. Arising from a conference held in his honor at Cornell University in the spring of 1978, it is made up of essays by six distinguished contributors who explore important critical questions related directly or indirectly to Abrams's work and its broader implications. The essays deal with Wordsworth as a prophet (Geoffrey Hartman) and as a poet of "silence" (Jonathan Wordsworth); history as metaphor (Wayne C. Booth); the nature of the critical canon (Thomas McFarland); the personal element in literary history (Lawrence Lipking); and the relation of Abrams's work to current developments in literary criticism (Jonathan Culler). Two central themes run throughout: the radically metaphorical nature of Romantic thought and the tendency of today's students to find Romanticism less rational than Abrams does. While the contributors do not always agree with one another, all are keenly aware of the contemporary challenge to humanistic values. A highlight of this book is the text of Abrams's masterly reply, delivered extemporaneously at the end of the conference. Other elements include a bibliography by Stuart A. Ende, a preface by Stephen M. Parish, and an editor's note.

Essays for M. H. Abrams

High Romantic Argument

Tracing Samuel Johnson's rocky climb from anonymity to fame, in the course of which he came to stand for both the greatness of English literature and the good sense of the common reader, Lipking shows how this life transformed the very nature of authorship.

Lawrence Lipking

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