Samuel Johnson and Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman: Nineteenth-century Popular Culture

Walt Whitman and Louis Sullivan: The Aesthetics of Egalitarianism

Samuel Johnson (circa 1769)

Samuel Johnson was a poet, critic, lexicographer, and the author of the famous Dictionary, which he began in 1747. In 1755, Johnson's Dictionary appeared in two large folio volumes. It represented about 9 years of work and was written almost single handedly. Johnson had only the assistance of a few amanuenses to copy out the quotations he marked. Johnson originally approached Lord Chesterfield ...

Chronic Conditions: Beckett, Bergson and Samuel Johnson

This article analyses the work of the twentieth-century late modernist Samuel Beckett, in light of the turn-of-the-century anti-rationalist Henri Bergson (1859-1941) and the eighteenth-century neoclassicist Samuel Johnson (1709-1784). What unites these three very different thinkers is a concern over habitual, automatic and involuntary behavior, which in all three cases has a distinctly neurolog...

Walt Whitman and Sir William Osler: a poet and his physician

follows with a wonderful piece on the cataloguing of the monstrous from the cabinet to the collections and representations of embryological monsters. Roy Porter, too, fills in the details for the eighteenth century. His brilliant essay on "monsters and the mad" fills in the conceptual gap which Zapperi leaves between these two categories. He shows how both categories reinforce each other on the...