 | Mary Poovey - 1985 - 309 pages
...not informed by experience, and consequently open to every false suggestion and partial account. ... If the power of example is so great, as to take possession...memory by a kind of violence, and produce effects almost without the intervention of the will, care ought to be taken that, when the choice is unrestrained,... | |
 | H. B. Nisbet, Claude Rawson - 2005 - 978 pages
...pedagogic promise and a pedagogic danger: [TJhese familiar histories may perhaps be made of greater use than the solemnities of professed morality, and convey...memory by a kind of violence, and produce effects almost without the intervention of the will, care ought to be taken, that when the choice is unrestrained,... | |
 | Leopold Damrosch - 1989 - 276 pages
...Johnson states plainly in Rambler No. 4 when he warns that modern fiction may overwhelm rational control, "take possession of the memory by a kind of violence, and produce effects almost without the intervention of the will." Hume, brooding about the force of irrational convictions... | |
 | Patricia Meyer Spacks - 1994 - 276 pages
...unpredictably activated by reading. Fiction can take possession of its readers, as a seducer might. But if the power of example is so great, as to take...memory by a kind of violence, and produce effects almost without the intervention of the will, care ought to be taken that, when the choice is unrestrained,... | |
 | Ann Jessie van Sant - 2004 - 168 pages
...(p. 130). 28 Johnson, The Rambler, The Tale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, III, 19-25. 29 "[T]he power of example is so great, as to take possession...memory by a kind of violence, and produce effects almost without the intervention of the will." Ibid., p. 22. 30 We find an exception in the Preface... | |
 | W. Daniel Wilson, Robert C. Holub - 1993 - 508 pages
...he continues in the same installment, "these familiar histories may perhaps be made of greater use than the solemnities of professed morality, and convey...virtue with more efficacy than axioms and definitions" (1: 20). Here Johnson does not yet seem to perceive the contradiction between imagination and the normative... | |
 | John Richetti, John Bender, Deirdre David, Michael Seidel - 1994 - 1094 pages
...identification that recent "familiar histories" like Clarissa and Tom Jones induce in their readers: "If the power of example is so great, as to take possession...memory by a kind of violence, and produce effects almost without the intervention of the will, care ought to be taken that . . . the best examples only... | |
 | Joseph F. Bartolomeo - 1994 - 228 pages
...114 According to Johnson, the effect of fiction on impressionable minds 115 necessitates regulation: If the power of example is so great, as to take possession...memory by a kind of violence, and produce effects almost without the intervention of the will, care ought to be taken that, when the choice is unrestrained,... | |
 | Athena Vrettos - 1995 - 266 pages
...these debates, which go back to Samuel Johnson's cautions against the danger of fictional examples: if the power of example is so great as "to take possession...memory by a kind of violence, and produce effects almost without the intervention of the will, care ought to be taken that . . . the best examples only... | |
 | Markman Ellis - 2004 - 284 pages
...'levelled with the rest of the world') means that 'these familiar histories may perhaps be made greater use than the solemnities of professed morality, and convey...with more efficacy than axioms and definitions'." Novels may (indeed, Johnson argues, should) exhibit only the 'best examples', and in this way, teach... | |
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For this reason these familiar histories may perhaps be made of greater use than the solemnities of professed morality, and convey the knowledge of vice and virtue with more efficacy than axioms and definitions. But if the power of example is so great... 
