Loving Dr. JohnsonUniversity of Chicago Press, 2005 - 322 頁 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. |
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afterlife allusion anatomy anecdote anecdote's Anna Seward autopsy biographer Boswell's Cambridge century chapter character Christian corpse couplet critical cultural dead desire disavowal dissection eighteenth eighteenth-century embodied enduring English Ephesian matron essay evokes fantasy fear Fiction figure Fineman's George Birkbeck ghost Hamlet haunted Hawthorne hero Hester Thrale Human Wishes Ibid imagination immortal inspired James Boswell John John Shade John Wolcot Johnson's autopsy Johnson's body Johnson's death Johnsonian Joshua Reynolds Kinbote letters Lichfield literary literature living London masculine mind monument moral Nabokov's narrative novel object once original Oxford Pale Fire paradoxically particular Piozzi poem Pope's portrait prose prosopopoeia quoted Rambler Ravelstein readers reading repetition Reynolds romance Samuel Beckett Samuel Johnson Shade's Shakespeare son's style surgeon things tics tion Tyers Tyers's uncanny University Press Uttoxeter Vanity vision vols W. K. Wimsatt William words writing Yale York