Introduction: Modernity Johnson?

Summary

Entrée

The traditional view of Samuel Johnson has been that of a quaintly nostalgic figure redolent of days long past, or that of a narrowly bigoted High Anglican Tory, insular and xenophobic, resistant to innovation and experimentation. Many mid-twentieth-century scholars and critics worked indefatigably to undermine the simplicity of the stereotype; in the process, they have enriched our understanding of this complex human being and inexhaustibly fecund writer. However, perhaps just enough of the old stereotypes linger to make the claim of Johnson as a representative of modernity, one who has significant and enduring connections with such Modernists as Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett, seem idiosyncratic, if not downright wrong-headed. But the time has come to adjust our notion of Johnson through the prisms of Modernism and modernity.

The first maneuver substantiating this contention must consist in trying to establish what we mean by Modernism. Forty or fifty years ago, this would have been a fairly simple procedure. In the 1960s and 1970s, most teachers and critics in the academy identified Modernism with an elite cadre of white (and largely male) creative writers flourishing from around the turn of the century roughly up to World War II. And there is a kernel of validity to this. Such figures as Joyce, Eliot, Pound, and Yeats redefined the terms of European literature by instituting an alternative to nineteenth-century traditions of realism and compositional convention. They initiated radical experimentation and established an avant-garde movement that worked to creatively deform and reinvigorate inherited genres, modes, and expectations. However, this conveniently tidy picture has been disrupted by challenges in recent decades that question the Eurocentric and masculine biases embedded in it, extending the concept to include signal feminine and global contributions.In 2017, the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, an online project presenting materials from nearly twenty different global cultures and regions, was published.3 Its chronological scope encompasses the nineteenth century to the present day and includes entries ranging from the can-can to Petrushka, the Shinkankakuha of Japan to William S. Burroughs, Charles Mingus to Thomas Adès. Such dazzling diversity, however, flirts with the danger of stretching the concept to an almost allinclusive inanity. While honoring the noble generosity underlying such expansions, the present volume strategically restricts its focus primarily to the Anglo-American Modernist tradition that coheres most naturally around the target figure here, Samuel Johnson.