| This dissertation falls into two parts. The first is concerned with the data surrounding the preparation, authorship, writing, delivery (never by Johnson himself), and the venue of the preaching of the sermons "left for publication" by Johnson's close friend, John Taylor, and of other sermons printed under others' names in the eighteenth century and since then thought to be Johnson's. The dissertation attributes all but one of these to Johnson, and argues that a manuscript sermon, with corrections in Johnson's hand, be added to the canon of his works. The hand of the main body of that manuscript text is identified as that of Taylor. The second part of the dissertation is concerned with the philosophical, homiletical, and theological context for these sermons, as revealed in the author's other writings and also in his intellectual patrimony. The dissertation analyzes Johnson's religious thought in three categories--the naturalistic, the rational or humanistic, and the specifically Christian.;Some of the material of the first part appears in the introduction and notes to the sermons published in the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, vol. 14, edited Jean Hagstrum and James Gray (Yale University Press, 1978). |
