Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets

Ethical Literary Criticism

This open access book seeks to explain how the literary commentary of the Lives of the Poets speaks to us today because of its ethical goals. Edward Tomarken elucidates this element of Johnson’s literary criticism by using Ralph Cohen’s genre method, the topic of Chapter One, “Why Genre”. Chapters two to five address the most prevalent genres of the Lives: tragedy, metaphysical poetry, the epic, the pastoral elegy, and the mock epic. Chapter six considers the rise of literary criticism as a genre. Chapter Seven demonstrates how ethical genre criticism relates literature to life. And the final chapter explains why, although Johnson considers ‘moral’ and ‘ethical’ as nearly interchangeable terms, Tomarken prefers ‘ethical’ because it relates genre criticism to present problems in literary and non-literary worlds.

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