The Selected Essays of Donald Greene

Donald Greene suggested that the eighteenth century should be seen as "The Age of Exuberance." It was an era unmatched, he argued, for intellectual ferment and literary accomplishment of the highest order. In his numerous books and in an essay canon that has few scholarly parallels in the postwar period, Greene helped recenter not only the age as a whole but also its principal writer, Samuel Johnson. He did so with a consistent scholarly commitment: one must reexamine intellectual and literary documents always in reference to the milieu and the values of the world in which they were reproduced; one must take no critical judgment, however imposing its author's reputation, on faith. Not only did Greene help redefine "The Age of Exuberance" and Samuel Johnson as few scholars of the post-World War II era, he also demonstrated that his scholarly methodology could illuminate such literary figures as Jane Austen, a near chronological neighbor, and equally a more distant one - Evelyn Waugh. The essays included here provide a sample of a far larger canon that might fairly be characterized as F. R. Leavis did of Johnson's critical commentary - "alive and life-giving." John L. Abbott is retired from the University of Connecticut, where he was Professor and Head of English.