Samuel Johnson and the Powers of Friendship

This book is the first to assess Johnsons diverse insights into friendshipthat is to say, his profound as well as widely ranging appreciation of itover the course of his long literary career. It examines his engagements with ancient philosophies of friendship and with subsequent reformulations of or departures from that diverse inheritance. The volume explores and illuminates Johnsons understanding of friendship in the private and public spheresin particular, friendships therapeutic amelioration of personal experience and transformative impact upon civil life. Doing so, it considers both his portrayals of interaction with his friends and his more overtly fictional representations of friendship across the many genres in which he wrote. It presents at once an original re-assessment of Johnsons writings and new interpretations of friendship as an element of civility in mid-eighteenth-century British culture.