Johnson's Critical Presence: Image, History, Judgment

Johnson's Critical Presence demonstrates how Johnson's criticism has for long been divided from the issues of modern criticism by historical narratives that have marked the progress of criticism from 'classic to romantic'. The image of Johnson constructed by his immediate antagonists has been preserved by the routines of historical representation, and mediated to the present day, most recently, by characterisations of 'radical theory'. By an in-depth analysis of major works by Johnson, Smallwood argues that the historicisation of eighteenth-century criticism can be more fruitfully understood in the light of the 'dialogic' and 'translational' historiography of such thinkers as Collingwood and Ricoeur, and that contexts of Johnson's criticism must include the poetry he read as well as the theories he espoused. In this way the book reinstates Johnson's 'presence' as a critic while displacing the 'history of ideas' as the leading paradigm for conceptualising the history of criticism.