A01=Bruce Redford
Author_Bruce Redford
Category=DNBL
Category=DSB
Category=DSK
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Product details
- ISBN 9780199284832
- Weight: 273g
- Dimensions: 139 x 215mm
- Publication Date: 07 Jul 2005
- Publisher: Oxford University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
For over two centuries Boswell's massive biography of Samuel Johnson has been both reverenced and reviled. Yet neither its admirers nor its critics have fully understood how the book was designed to work upon them. Boswell himself is partly to blame: throughout the Life he directs attention away from artistry to industry, from creative choices to dedicated researches. Yet his working manuscript, one of the twentieth century's greatest literary discoveries, tells a much different tale. Designing the Life of Johnson, the first study of its kind, reconstructs Boswell's models and methods by charting this textual labyrinth. It begins by analysing the stages that led to the first edition, goes on to reveal the impact of portrait and theatre-piece upon the structure of the Life, and ends by uncovering the transformation of Johnson from savage into sage. The result is a more subtle, more vital assessment of Boswell the designer - and an enhanced awareness of biography's power to make life into art.
Professor Redford is a literary historian, editor, and critic, with a strong interest in classical studies and the visual arts. He has published essays on topics as diverse as medieval hagiography, rococo portraiture, and the religious poetry of W.H. Auden. During the past decade and a half, his scholarship has centered on eighteenth-century British culture. The Converse of the Pen: Acts of Intimacy in the Eighteenth-Century Familiar Letter (1986) was followed by The Letters of Samuel Johnson (five volumes, 1992-94), Venice and the Grand Tour (1996), and the second volume of Boswell's Life of Johnson: An Edition of the Original Manuscript (1998). In 2001/2002 he delivered the Lyell Lectures in bibliography at Oxford University; these lectures have been published as Designing the "Life of Johnson" (2002).
A past president of the Johnson Society, he has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, All Souls College (Oxford), and the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
