Reconsidering Biography

As part of the Samuel Johnson tercentenary commemoration, the University of Georgia Press published the first full scholarly edition of Sir John Hawkins's Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1787). From its inception, Hawkins's work, arising from a close relationship with Johnson that spanned over forty-five years, challenged certain adulatory views of Johnson and has continued to raise interesting critical questions about both Johnsonian biography and the genre of biography generally. Reconsidering Biography collects new essays that explore Hawkins's biography of Johnson within its historical, political, legal, and personal contexts. More particularly, this volume considers how Hawkins's approach to recording the Life of Johnson opens up broader questions about early modern biography and its relationship with eighteenth-century trends in aesthetics, politics, and historiography. These sophisticated and informed essays on a curious and often vexed friendship, and its literary offspring, supply a colorful and expansive view of the role of life-writing in the eighteenth-century literary imagination.

Martine W. Brownley is Goodrich C. White Professor of English at Emory University where she also serves as the director of the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry.

Chapter 1 Acknowledgements Chapter 2 Abbreviations and Short Titles Chapter 3 Introdcution: Why Hawkins? Chapter 4 Re-Assesing Sir John Hawkins's The Life of Samuel Johnson, L.L.D.: Some Reflections Part 5 Part One: Sir John Hawkins and the Developement of English Biography Chapter 6 A Rhetoric of Truth and Instruction: Hawkins's The Life of Samuel Johnson, L.L.D., and Eighteenth-Century Biographical Practice Chapter 7 Hawkins and Biography as a Genre Chapter 8 Hawkin's The Life of Samuel Johnson, L.L.D., and Modern Biographies Part 9 Part Two: Sir John Hawkins's Johnson and His Contexts Chapter 10 Sir John Hawkins on Richard Savage and the Profession of Authorship Chapter 11 From Bigotry to Genius: The Treatment of Johnson's Poltics in Hawkins's The Life of Samuel Johnson, L.L.D. 12 Hawkin's Biography, and the Law Chapter 13 Bibliography Chapter 14 Notes on Contributors