Dead Masters: Mentoring and Intertextuality in Samuel Johnson examines the dual issues of mentoring and intertextuality as an integrated phenomenon. Through a series of fresh and novel readings of Johnsonian and Boswellian texts, the book offers insight not only into these two issues, but further advances our awareness of the formal complexities of Johnson's writings and the psychological substratum from which they issue.
Lee utilizes a variety of critical perspectives—for example, the tools of Bloomean anxiety of influence, post-colonial and deconstructive criticism, and explicative analysis—under the generalized and flexible rubric of mentoring to explore the processes of textual influence, mentoring relationships, and cultural authority within Johnson's work. The goals of this book include the consolidation of mentoring as a fruitful critical perspective from which to understand Johnson; the establishment of an intertextual framework for understanding Johnson; and the effort to offer a series of readings of Johnson that more fully divulge the power and complexity of his writing. The book further seeks to effect, via the mediation of a series of pragmatic readings, a rapprochement between the theoretical divide separating psychological interpretations of Johnson (interpersonal mentoring encounters) and linguistic and formal interpretations (especially intertextuality).