O projeto crítico de Samuel Johnson no The Rambler: uma crítica literária entre os antigos e os modernos

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to conduct a political reading of Samuel Johnson's literary criticism in his series of essays titled The Rambler (1750-52), initially published as a periodical. This analysis will demonstrate that the argumentative structure of Johnson’s literary criticism, in addressing the aesthetic debates of his era - particularly the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns - constitutes a critical project that, in its form, dramatizes the bourgeois intellectual’s attempt to reclaim an idealized sphere of early 18th-century England. This ideal space was represented by a bourgeois public sphere, a symbol of a historical moment characterized by an intimate connection between the literary critic and his reading public, a context increasingly eroded by the advancing productive forces of a new phase of capitalism and the dissolution of the Ancien Régime. As the central object of this study is Johnson’s literary criticism, this analysis will center on essays from Rambler numbers 1, 3, 4, 36, 37, and 156.