This year Yale University Press published Samuel Johnson, a diverse and accessible selected works of eighteenth-century Britain’s preeminent man of letters. The following excerpt is a section from one of Johnson’s pseudonymous essays in the publication Rambler. This quality of looking forward into futurity seems the unavoidable condition of a
Michael Hunter— Sir Walter Scott was second to none in his use of supernatural stories and allusions in a fictional setting. In Rob Roy, for instance, he speaks of fairies as “a race of airy beings, who formed an intermediate class between men and dæmons, and who, if not positively malignant
Francis Spufford— Here comes the winter night. If we were our oldest ancestors, tucked into draughty recesses of caves with blue hands hugged around us as we slept, we’d be dreaming of summer: we’d be using our human freedom to step away from circumstances to wish that all mornings were
Jonathan Swift, although widely remembered as both an author and a public figure, remains quite enigmatic today. Leo Damrosch, author of the New York Times Notable Book of 2013, Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World, and Ernest Bernbaum Research Professor of Literature at Harvard University, recently discussed the man’s mysterious
History has a funny way of romanticizing the past, blurring the lines between hard facts and fluffy representations. Painters, poets, actors — the public romanticizes their lives, creating narratives of inspiration and untouchability. This principle is even more drastic in studying and discussing Romantic poets, whose lives we associate with