Johnson Agonistes and Other Essays

Johnson Agonistes and Other Essays brings together Bertrand H. Bronson’s most influential meditations on Samuel Johnson and his circle, offering a master class in literary criticism and intellectual history. Opening with the title essay, Bronson presents Johnson as a man of turbulent imagination and fierce conservatism, a poet-philosopher whose combativeness was as central to his thought as his piety. Subsequent essays probe Boswell’s complex self-fashioning as Johnson’s biographer, re-evaluate Johnson’s ill-fated tragedy Irene, and situate him within a “double tradition” of radical iconoclast and authoritarian moralist. Across these essays, Bronson illuminates the paradoxes that made Johnson at once an enemy of metaphysical abstraction and a defender of hierarchy, a critic of poverty who nonetheless distrusted reform.

Written with stylistic verve and intellectual sympathy, this collection showcases Bronson’s ability to weave close textual analysis with sweeping judgments about character, society, and ideas. For students of eighteenth-century literature, Johnson’s prose and poetry, or the art of biography, Johnson Agonistes remains a touchstone, modeling how to read a figure whose contradictions were integral to his genius. At once literary portrait, critical reappraisal, and meditation on authority and imagination, the book continues to shape how readers encounter both Johnson and the interpretive traditions surrounding him.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1965.