Designing the Life of Johnson

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.

• Introduction ; 1. Imprinting Johnson ; 2. Representing Johnson ; 3. Dramatizing Johnson ; 4. Transmitting Johnson ; 5. Taming Johnson ; Select Bibliography

Review from previous edition Bruce Redford's Lyell Lectures are a splendid work, now setting Boswell's Life of Johnson on the very highest grounds of artistic biography.