- 472 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling students and researchers to read for themselves, for example, comments on early performances of Shakespeare's plays, or reactions to the first publication of Jane Austen's novels. The carefully selected sources range from landmark essays in the history of criticism to journalism and contemporary opinion, and little published documentary material such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included, in order to demonstrate the fluctuations in an author's reputation. Each volume contains an introduction to the writer's published works, a selected bibliography, and an index of works, authors and subjects. The Collected Critical Heritage set will be available as a set of 68 volumes and the series will also be available in mini sets selected by period (in slipcase boxes) and as individual volumes.
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Footnotes
1. Johnson seeking a publisher for London
| 1 | Probably Johnson’s ode ‘Ad Urbanum’. |
| 2 | Although Cave liked the poem he suggested that Robert Dodsley should publish it. |
| 3 | A poem (1737) by Thomas Beach. |
2. William Mudford on London and The Vanity of Human Wishes
| * | ‘His poetry, though not any where loaded with epithets, is destitute of animation. We are now and then struck with a fine thought, a fine line, or a fine passage, but little interested by the whole. After reading his best pieces once, few are desirous of reading them again.’ [William Shaw,] Life of Johnson, 1785, [71–2]. |
| 1 | Boswell, Life, i. 128–9. |
| * | He did not often conform himself to his own precepts. In his Essay on Pope’s Epitaphs, (which is indeed an invidious piece of criticism), he says, ‘I think it may be observed that the particle O! used at the beginning of a sentence, always offends.’4 Yet, in his translation of the dialogue between Hector and Andromache, he himself uses it. How would the Trojans brand great Hector’s name, And one base action sully all my fame, Acquired by wounds and battles bravely fought! Oh! how my soul abhors so mean a thought.5 And in many other of his pieces, as his ‘Lines to a Friend’, ‘To a Young Lady on her birthday’, &c. &c. |
| 2 | Both this and the previous example of tautology were cited by William Shaw (Memoirs of the Life of Johnson, 51) to whom, it would appear, Mudford was often indebted. |
| 3 | Ambrose Philips (1675?–1749) and Nahum Tate (1652–1715). |
| 4 | Lives, i... |
Table of contents
- THE CRITICAL HERITAGE SERIES
- General Editor’s Preface
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Note on the Text
- Introduction
- JOHNSON’S POEMS
- IRENE
- THE RAMBLER
- THE DICTIONARY
- RASSELAS
- EDITION OF THE PLAYS OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
- POLITICAL PAMPHLETS
- JOURNEY TO THE WESTERN ISLANDS OF SCOTLAND
- LIVES OF THE ENGLISH POETS
- JOHNSON’S PROSE STYLE
- BIOGRAPHICAL AND GENERAL
- Bibliography
- Select Index
- Footnotes