A bibliography of studies of Samuel Johnson from 1986 to 1998. Dr Lynch records not only writings about Johnson and Boswell but also about a wide variety of related topics. There are nearly 2000 entries, alphabetically arranged for easy access through the indexes.

A Bibliography of Johnsonian Studies, 1986-1998 (Ams Studies in the Eighteenth Century)

Reference

Lynch, Jack

Catalogs & Directories

Ams Pr Inc

While working on a blackmail case in the placid community of Sausalito, Peter Bragg stumbles into a web of extortion, arson, torture, and murder linked to the construction of an elegant new hotel complex

Sausalito

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Mystery

GRAND CENTRAL PUB.

Bragg returns to San Quentin State Prison to stop a bloodbath as war breaks out between the guards and a gang of convicts holding hostages, who are demanding the release of their leader's kid brother, who has been accused of murder

San Quentin

Hardboiled, hard-hitting private detective Peter Bragg returns to his hometown of Seattle in response to old friend Benny Bartlett, who has become the target of vicious threats and violent attacks

Seattle

Literature & Fiction

1st edition Gold Medal 1982 paperback fine condition. In stock shipped from our UK warehouse

Bragg's Hunch

fawcett gold Medal

Deception and Detection in Eighteenth-Century Britain

In the first extended treatment of the debates surrounding public deception in eighteenth-century Britain, Jack Lynch contends that forgery, fakery, and fraud make explicit the usually unspoken grounds on which Britons made sense of their world. Confrontations with inauthenticity, in other words, bring tacitly understood conceptions of reality to the surface. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary print and manuscript sources”not only books and pamphlets, but ballads, comic prints, legal proceedings, letters, and diaries”Lynch focuses on the debates they provoked, rather than the forgers themselves. He offers a comprehensive treatment of the criticism surrounding fraud in most of the noteworthy controversies of the long eighteenth century. To this end, his study is structured around topics related to the arguments over deception in Britain, whether they concerned George Psalmanazar's Formosan hoax at the beginning of the eighteenth century or William Henry Ireland's Shakespearean imposture at the end. Beginning with the question of what constitutes deception and ending with an illuminating chapter on what was at stake in these debates for eighteenth-century British thinkers, Lynch's accessibly written study takes the reader through the means”whether simple, sophisticated, or tortuously argued”by which partisans on both sides struggled to define which of the apparent contradictions were sufficient to disqualify a claim to authenticity. Fakery, Lynch persuasively argues, transports us to the heart of eighteenth-century notions of the value of evidence, of the mechanisms of perception and memory, of the relationship between art and life, of historicism, and of human motivation.

British & Irish

Routledge

Becoming Shakespeare: The Unlikely Afterlife That Turned a Provincial Playwright into the Bard

Becoming Shakespeare begins where most Shakespeare stories end―with his death in 1616―and relates the fascinating story of his unlikely transformation from provincial playwright to universal Bard. Unlike later literary giants, Shakespeare created no stir when he died. Though he'd once had a string of hit plays, he had been retired in the country for six years, and only his family, friends, and business partners seemed to care that he was gone. Within a few years he was nearly forgotten. And when London's theaters were shut down in 1642, he seemed destined for oblivion.
With the Restoration in 1660, though, the theaters were open once again, and Shakespeare began his long ascent: No longer merely one playwright among many, he became the transcendent genius at the heart of English culture. Fifty years after the Restoration scholars began taking him seriously. Fifty years after that he was considered England's greatest genius. And by 1800 he was practically divine.
Jack Lynch vividly chronicles Shakespeare's afterlife―from the revival of his plays to the decades when his work was co-opted and "improved" by politicians and other playwrights, and culminating with the "Bardolatry" of the Stratford celebration of Shakespeare's three-hundredth birthday in 1864. Becoming Shakespeare is not only essential reading for anyone intrigued by Shakespeare, but it also offers a consideration of the vagaries of fame.

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Walker Books

Samuel Johnson's Dictionary: Selections from the 1755 Work That Defined the English Language

Samuel Johnson’s 2,300-page Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755, marked a milestone in a language that was in desperate need of standards. It was the first English dictionary to devote so much space to everyday words, to be so resoundingly thorough in its definition, and to illustrate usage by quoting from Shakespeare and other great writers. For the next 150 years, until the arrival of the Oxford English Dictionary, Johnson’s Dictionary would define the language, used, as it was, by Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, Wordsworth and Coleridge--and by all of America’s founding fathers.   This new edition contains more than 3,100 selections faithfully adapted from the original by Jack Lynch. Etymology, definitions, and illustrative passages appear in their entirety. Three helpful new indexes have been created out of entries in this edition, and in addition, Johnson’s “The Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language,” written eight years before the Dictionary and seldom seen in print, is reproduced in its entirety.

Dictionaries & Thesauruses

Walker&Company

"Knowledge is of two kinds," said Samuel Johnson in 1775. "We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it." Today we think of Wikipedia as the source of all information, the ultimate reference. Yet it is just the latest in a long line of aggregated knowledge--reference works that have shaped the way we've seen the world for centuries. You Could Look It Up chronicles the captivating stories behind these great works and their contents, and the way they have influenced each other. From The Code of Hammurabi, the earliest known compendium of laws in ancient Babylon almost two millennia before Christ to Pliny's Natural History; from the 11th-century Domesday Book recording land holdings in England to Abraham Ortelius's first atlas of the world; from Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language to The Whole Earth Catalog to Google, Jack Lynch illuminates the human stories and accomplishment behind each, as well as its enduring impact on civilization. In the process, he offers new insight into the value of knowledge.

You Could Look It Up: The Reference Shelf From Ancient Babylon to Wikipedia

History

Ancient Civilizations

Bloomsbury Press

In its long history, the English language has had many lawmakers-those who have tried to regulate or otherwise organize the way we speak. The Lexicographer's Dilemma poses a pair of questions-what does proper English mean, and who gets to say what's right? Our ideas of correct or proper English have a history, and today's debates over the state of the language-whether about Ebonics in schools, the unique use of language in a South Park episode, or split infinitives in the Times-make sense only in historical context. As historian Jack Lynch has discovered, every rule has a human history, and the characters who populate his narrative are as interesting for their obsessions as for their erudition. Charting the evolution of English with wit and intelligence, he provides a rich historical perspective that makes us appreciate a new the hard-won standards we now enjoy.

The Lexicographer's Dilemma: The Evolution of 'Proper' English, from Shakespeare to South Park

Americas

Bloomsbury Publishing

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