Loving Dr. Johnson Helen Deutsch The autopsy of Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) initiated to centuries of Johnson 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 leading a style and a name - the Age of Johnson - to a now-contested definition of 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 the Bowsell 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, Deutshc's study is also the first of its kind to examine the practice and rituals of Johnsonian societies on both sides of the Atlantic, 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, this book will engage all readers interested in Samuel Johnson or in question of canon formation. Helen Deutsch is professor pf 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"