| This thesis examines the work of Samuel Johnson in relation to the rise of domesticity in eighteenth-century England and to the domestication, or novelization, of the period's literature. In doing so, it seeks to extend and recontextualize the now common view of Johnson as a transitional figure---a writer poised uncertainly between the aesthetic ideals of the classical tradition, in which he was profoundly learned, and his strong attraction to aesthetic approaches proscribed, or devalued, by the same tradition.; The first chapter considers Johnson's thinking about the domestic world and private character in connection with the history and evolving ideology of domesticity, and finds that, though his use of the term domestic sometimes betrays a conventional sense, classical in origin, of the domestic world's unimportance, Johnson's more explicit treatments of the subject reflect a strong perception, modern in temper, of that world's centrality and significance.; The second chapter shifts to an aesthetic context and to Johnson's role as an active proponent of literary domestication. I propose that Johnson's critical pronouncements---especially his references to domestic drama and his discussions of such diverse art-forms as biography, realistic fiction, and portrait painting---reveal a coherent aesthetic of domestic art, an aesthetic which, in stressing the value and appeal of proximity, amounts to a repudiation of the Longinian sublime, which equated greatness with distance, rarity, and grandeur. At the same time, Johnson's understanding of poetic language and, more crucially, his own stylistic practice were deeply conditioned by Longinian prescriptions, and the clash between these contradictory ideals---on the one hand those of the domestic perspective, with its promotion of the minute and mundane, and, on the other, that of the Longinian sublime, with its striving after dignity and grandeur---constitutes the central drama in the novelizing of Johnson's own art.; Chapter three examines the role of the domestic in The Rambler , and argues that Johnson's narrative art, as practised in the short fictions, was not a static medium but an evolving one, and that it developed in the direction of domestic realism.; Chapter four applies this paradigm to Lives of the Poets, the culminating expression of Johnson's own domestic art. |
