Samuel Johnson: The Arc of the Pendulum offers unique insight into
the works of Samuel Johnson by re-considering William Hazlitt's
oft-cited comparison between Johnson's prose and a pendulum. In
1819, William Hazlitt condemned Samuel Johnson's prose style as 'a
species of rhyming' in which 'the close of the period follows as
mechanically as the oscillation of a pendulum, the sense is
balanced with the sound'. Predictable, formulaic, and unresponsive,
Hazlitt's Johnson was 'incapable of latitude and compromise, a mere
automaton who rebounded from one position to its opposite extreme'.
This collection of essays focuses on Johnson's works, rather than
perceptions of his personality, and argues that Johnson's perceived
erratic opinions reflect an understanding of the complexity,
instability, and contradictions of the world in which he lived. The
volume challenges Hazlitt's influential reading of the Johnsonian
pendulum, focusing on the uses and enjoyments of inconsistency, and
the varieties of instability, irresolution, and active change which
are revealed by and within Johnson. Chapters from a strong team of
contributors present new perspectives on Johnson's work, life, and
reception. The chapters address questions of style, authority,
language, lexicography, and biography across a range of Johnson's
writings from the early poetry to the late prose. Johnson emerges
from these chapters not as a writer trapped within a set of
oppositions, but as one who engages imaginatively and vigorously
with flux, dynamism, and inconclusiveness. From the late eighteenth
century onwards, to be 'Johnsonian' has typically been made
synonymous with firm resolution and trenchant opinion, with
polysyllabic excess and a style removed from the exigencies and
accidents of ordinary existence. And yet, as this volume suggests,
Johnson's life and writings embody the critical and creative play
of ideas, a form of interaction with the world which is shaped by
instability, contradiction, and combat.
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