Boswell's big adventures: London, Scotland, London

Ingram, Allan (2009) Boswell's big adventures: London, Scotland, London. In: Adventure: an eighteenth-century idiom: essays on the daring and the bold as a pre-modern medium. AMS Press, New York, pp. 3-22. ISBN 978-0404648589

Full text not available from this repository. (Request a copy)

Abstract

The vicarious James Boswell, biographer of Samuel Johnson, presents aworld of both real and imagined adventures, the longest of which is his move to London and away from his Scottish homeland. For Boswell, London combines activit with expectation so as to simulate the kind of adventure found in literary texts. london stands in contrast to Scotland, which for Boswell suggests workaday values and pedestrian obligations. After successfully attaching himslef to Samuel Johnson and profiting from his biography, he finds himself less able to regard London as an imaginatively compelling place, ending up seeking adventure by "killing the moments, waiting for something to happen."

Item Type: Book Section
Subjects: Q300 English studies
Department: Faculties > Arts, Design and Social Sciences > Humanities
Related URLs:
Depositing User: EPrint Services
Date Deposited: 07 Jun 2010 13:39
Last Modified: 12 Oct 2019 19:22
URI: http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/3760

Actions (login required)

View Item View Item

Downloads

Downloads per month over past year

View more statistics