New publication:
JAMES BOSWELL. Aberdeen: AHRC Research Institute of Irish and Scottish
Studies,
2007. £11.99. 134pp.
Order from:
http://www.abdn.ac.uk/riiss/aberdeenintroductions.shtml.
James Boswell (1740-95) has gone down in history as the biographer of
Samuel Johnson, a sexual adventurer, a toadying Scot, and as a writer who
typified the divided consciousness of the Scottish eighteenth century.
Before the discovery and (since 1950) publication of his private papers,
critics often saw him as a bit of a fool, whose achievement was primarily
that of being lucky enough to be the friend and amanuensis of the most
famous Englishman of his day. More recently, the stature of Boswell's
achievement and his complexity as a writer have been better appreciated,
but without adequate understanding of his role as a specifically Scottish
author and thinker of the age of Enlightenment: in particular, his anxious
critique of Humean scepticism is discussed here. This study examines,
through a close reading of both published and unpublished materials, how
Boswell deliberately sets out to write ambiguously about himself and the
major events of his time; how, far from echoing Johnson, Boswell
deliberately improves on his sayings and teasingly criticizes him; and how
Boswell's political and religious sympathies with Jacobitism, Scotland and
Catholicism coloured the way in which he understood his own, and his
country's, uncertain place in the new world of British imperial opportunity.
Murray Pittock is Professor of Scottish and Romantic Literature at the
University of Manchester, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh
and the English Association. He is currently editing Boswell's Political
Correspondence for the Yale Boswell edition.
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