"Donald Greene (1914-1997) was one of the great scholars of his generation. Born in Canada, he took his MA from University College, London, and PhD from Columbia University. His numerous academic appointments culminated at the University of Southern California, where he served as Leo S. Bing Professor of English until his retirement. He authored and edited a number of books, including seven on Samuel Johnson. Greene was instrumental in founding the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and supported scholars throughout the world in their investigations of this literary period."

"This volume is the first to reprint essays by Greene that reflect the strengths of a far larger canon. Part I, "The Age of Exuberance," features his varied explorations of eighteenth-century literature as a whole: the intellectual history that defined this era, his pioneering and revisionist assessment of its poetry, and arguably its most exuberant writer, Jonathan Swift. Part II, "Johnson Without Boswell," features what many consider to be Greene's most important scholarly achievement - decentering Boswell as Johnson's chief interpreter in the Life and recentering the latter in his massive literary canon as well as through crucial biographical elements that never found their way into Boswell's supposedly definitive biography.

Part III, "The Terrain of Literature," features Greene's examination of a variety of literary approaches to literature in an era when the subject needs to be referred as well to cognitive science as more conventional critical modes, even deconstruction, that have long defined it. Additionally, he illuminates important works by writers as various as Jane Austen and Evelyn Waugh. These essays, as well as the book as a whole, are framed here by Greene's assessment of Canadian literature that calls attention to the native terrain that he originally called home and how the latter contributed to the making of one of the most cosmopolitan scholars of his era."--Jacket.