Download or read book Samuel Johnson and the Art of Sinking 1709-1791 written by Freya Johnston and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2005-02-17 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Johnson's centrality in the late eighteenth century makes his fretfulness about the social and aesthetic boundaries of writing especially fertile and influential. This book suggests that literary taxonomies, inventories, and canons simultaneously construct and reject a hierarchy of ethical as well as aesthetic values, and examines how figures of cultural authority conceive of their relationships to and with the margins of writing and of society.