Literary Leviathans

Abstract

This chapter shows how Samuel Johnson’s authorial persona focalized a larger crisis of political and literary authority during the period spanning the American War and the French Revolution. Where Johnson’s commitment to absolute sovereignty set him at odds with changing conceptions of power, the ‘warm Toryism’ of James Boswell allowed him to navigate the onset of Britain’s counter-revolutionary turn and its imperial correlatives with far greater success. These changing conceptions of authority converged in Boswell’s monumental biography, which thereby illuminates crucial changes to the relationship between literature and politics. Through Johnson’s reputation in America and posthumous satires about his views on popular revolution, the chapter shows how Johnson’s dogmatic views on authority, together with his volatile personality, infused both his writings and his politics with uncertainty. Boswell’s depiction of Johnson in his 1791 Life of Johnson in turn acquired heightened and transformed significance amidst fears of anti-royalist unrest and the explosion of plebeian political activity associated with the aftermath of the French Revolution, and, to an important and neglected degree, was the product of both this changing political atmosphere and changing conceptions of the literary domain.