The Life of Samuel Johnson - Brossura

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Brossura

ISBN 10: 0140436626 ISBN 13: 9780140436624

Casa editrice: Penguin Classics, 2025

Riassunto

In Life of Samuel Johnson di Boswell, una delle figure più importanti della letteratura inglese viene rivelata con un'immediatezza e un'originalità senza pari, in una biografia a cui dobbiamo gran parte della nostra conoscenza dell'uomo stesso. Attraverso una serie di aneddoti riccamente dettagliati, Johnson emerge come una figura socievole, che si impegna vigorosamente e si scontra con grandi contemporanei come Garrick, Goldsmith, Burney e Burke, e naturalmente con lo stesso Boswell. Tuttavia, ansie e ossessioni oscuravano anche le ore private di Johnson, e l'attenzione di Boswell a ogni sfaccettatura del carattere di Johnson rende questa biografia tanto commovente quanto divertente. In questa edizione completamente nuova e integrale, l'introduzione di David Womersley esamina i motivi alla base dell'opera di Boswell e le differenze tra i due uomini che li hanno attratti l'uno verso l'altro. Contiene anche cronologie di Boswell e Johnson, appendici e indici completi, inclusi dettagli biografici.

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Informazioni sull?autore

James Boswell (1740-1795) was a lawyer, diarist, and author born in Edinburgh. He is best known as the biographer of Samuel Johnson. Boswell is known for taking voracious notes on the grand tour of Europe that he took as a young nobleman and, subsequently, of his tour to Scotland with Johnson. He also recorded meetings and conversations with eminent individuals belonging to 'The Club', including David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Joshua Reynolds and Oliver Goldsmith. Samuel Johnson was born in Lichfield in 1709 and was educated at Lichfield Grammar School and, for a short time, at Pembroke College, Oxford. In 1735 he married Elizabeth Jervis Porter and in 1737 moved to London. There, he became a regular contributor to the Gentleman's Magazine, but struggled to earn a living from writing. His London: A Poem in Imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal was published anonymously in 1738 and attracted some attention. From 1750 to 1752 he issued the Rambler, a periodical written almost entirely by himself, and consolidated his position as a notable moral essayist with some twenty-five essays in the Adventurer. When his Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1755, Johnson took on the proportions of a literary monarch in the London of his day. In need of money to visit his sick mother, he wrote Rasselas (1759) reportedly in the evenings of one week, finishing a couple of days after his mother's death. In 1763 Boswell became his faithful follower and it is mainly due to him that we owe our intimate knowledge of Johnson. Johnson's last major work was Lives of the Poets. He died in December 1784.

David Womersley is the Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. He has published widely on English literature from the Renaissance to the early nineteenth century. For Penguin he has edited Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Augustan Critical Writing, Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful and Other Pre-Revolutionary Writings, and Samuel Johnson's Selected Essays.

Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Penguin Classics
• Data di pubblicazione: 2025
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0140436626
• ISBN 13: 9780140436624
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: Penguin Random House Ireland Limited; productsafety@penguin.co.uk; ; Morrison Chambers, 32 Nassau Street; Dublin; Irlanda