18th century
A01=Helen Deutsch
anatomy
Author_Helen Deutsch
authority
authors
autopsy
biography
body
boswell
britain
british
canon
cat
Category=DSB
chronic illness
classic
control
criticism
disability
england
englishness
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
fame
identity
individuality
language
literary critic
literature
masculinity
nationalism
nonfiction
samuel johnson
scars
science
tics
tourettes
Product details
- ISBN 9780226143828
- Weight: 567g
- Dimensions: 15 x 24mm
- Publication Date: 01 Nov 2005
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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The autopsy of Samuel Johnson (1709-84) initiated two centuries of Johnsonian anatomy - both in medical speculation about his famously unruly body and in literary devotion to his anecdotal remains. Even today, Johnson is an enduring symbol of individuality, authority, masculinity, and Englishness, ultimately lending a style and a name - the Age of Johnson - to the eighteenth-century English literary canon. "Loving Dr. Johnson" uses the enormous popularity of Johnson to understand a singular case of author love and to reflect upon what the love of authors has to do with the love of literature. Helen Deutsch's work is driven by several impulses, among them her affection for both Johnson's work and Boswell's biography of him, and her own distance from the largely male tradition of Johnsonian criticism - a tradition to which she remains indebted and to which Loving Dr. Johnson is ultimately an homage. Limning sharply Johnson's capacious oeuvre, Deutsch's study is also the first of its kind to examine the practices and rituals of Johnsonian societies around the world, wherein Johnson's literary work is now dwarfed by the figure of the writer himself.
An absorbing look at one iconic author and his afterlives, "Loving Dr. Johnson" will be of enormous value to students of English literature and literary scholars keenly interested in canon formation.
Helen Deutsch is associate professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Resemblance and Disgrace: Alexander Pope and the Deformation of Culture and coeditor of "Defects": Engendering the Modern Body.
