Perhaps it is best to begin with what this book is not. It is not a catalogue of Renaissance sources and analogues for Johnson's works: W. B. C. Watkins produced such a list in 1936, and more than six decades later it needs little modification. Nor does it chronicle eighteenth-century responses to the major works and authors of the English Renaissance – what Johnson's contemporaries had to say about Skelton, for instance, or Marlowe – since that task is ably fulfilled by Routledge's Critical Heritage series and other reception histories. Neither yet does it tell the story of eighteenth-century Shakespeareanism or Miltonism, which critics such as G. F. Parker, Michael Dobson, Jean Marsden, Margreta de Grazia, and Dustin Griffin have done admirably. My work, though indebted to all of these, follows a different path, one pointed out, if not blazed, by René Wellek. In 1941, Wellek proposed “A ‘History of English Literary History,’” which he believed “a legitimate and even urgent task of English scholarship” (Wellek, The Rise of English Literary History, p. v). In the intervening half-century, few have shared Wellek's sense of urgency; but it may now be time to synthesize the scholarship on the history of literature and of literary studies, and to try to discern significant patterns.

This book is just such an essay in the history of literary history: it is a study of the eighteenth century's conception of the era we have come to call the Renaissance.