With apologies for cross postings:
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study examines, through a close reading of both published and unpublished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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