Loving Dr. Johnson

Cloth $40.00 ISBN: 9780226143828 Published November 2005

E-book $7.00 to $32.00 About E-books ISBN: 9780226143859 Published February 2011

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.

Review Quotes
Contents

"Loving Dr. Johnson is a brilliant work about a high canonical figure whose mind and body inspire passions that are at once exemplary and peculiar. Deutsch's study is as much about Johnson—as a writer, an institution, and a national figure—as it is about ourselves and our intense and sometimes rather bizarre investments in him. This is an original and important book."—Claudia L. Johnson, Princeton University

“This is a deeply personal meditation about one of the most public figures in literary history. Helen Deutsch simultaneously manages to present Johnson as a man, a genius, a monster, a cult, a way of life, a signifier, an icon, and, above all, a body. Her fascination with the details of his life and death, his disability and physicality, and the ultimate opening up of Johnson through autopsy presents him for the first time in body as well as soul. We get to appreciate, in the end, not only Johnson but the cerebral and affective meditations by one of our more insightful critics and scholars.”—Lennard J. Davis, University of Illinois at Chicago

“Helen Deutsch has written an utterly engrossing study of the afterlife of Dr. Johnson, that strangely monstrous, quasi-mythical folk imago who comes to life in the anecdote-collecting pages of James Boswell and other biographers. This is one of the most exhilarating and exhilarated accounts that I have ever encountered of a living audience’s affective relationship with a dead author.”—Deidre Lynch, Indiana University

"A revolutionary work in the sense that Deutsch discusses Johnson's disability, his numerous bodily ailments . . . and physicality, and for the first time sheds a beam of light on Johnson's autopsy. . . . I have hardly any doubt that had Boswell been alive to read Deutsch's book today he wouldn't have hesitated to doff his hat to her."

"Among Johnsonians it is hard to introduce a new topic or to escape inherited ways of discussing the old ones. Helen Deutsch can be commended for doing both."

"A singular and powerful book, not quite like any other academic book I read during this year's sojourn, but one of the most memorable. It is a beautifully, even eloquently written book about anecdote and author love: each chapter focuses on some apocryphal Johnsonian moment or fable and spins out of it a wide, delicate reading that analyzes Johnsonian readers."—Cynthia Wall, Studies in English Literature

"[Deutsch] demonstrates the power of Johnson and the discourse he generates to move the emotions and stimulate the human mind to vigorous activity--which will be a source of pleasure to at least some people as long as our species can be called human."

Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Beginning, in Which Nothing Is Found
1. Johnsonian Romance
2. Style's Body: The Case of Dr. Johnson
3. "Look, my Lord, it comes": Uncritical Reading and Johnsonian Communion
4. The Ephesian Matron and Johnson's Corpse
5. Coda: Anecdotal Errancy, Three Authors
Notes
Index

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Culture Studies

History: British History

History of Science

Literature and Literary Criticism: British and Irish Literature

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