Rasselas

As a young man, Samuel Johnson, one of the most celebrated English authors of the eighteenth century, translated A Voyage to Abyssinia by Jeronimo Lobo, a tome by a Portuguese missionary about the country now known as Ethiopia. Far from being a potboiler, this translation left an indelible imprint on Johnson. Demonstrating its importance through a range of research and attentive close readings, Abyssinia's Samuel Johnson highlights the lasting influence of an African people on Johnson's oeuvre. http://global.oup.com/academic/product/abyssinias-samuel-johnson-9780199793211?q=wendy%20belcher&lang=en&cc=us

Samuel Johnson's philosophical novel THE HISTORY OF RASSELAS, PRINCE OF ABISSINIA, deals with "The Choice of Life."    This phrase, which is emphasized several times throughout the novel,  is also its shortest conceivable summary.  The issue of that choice, however, is not clear.  In spite of Johnson's well-turned aphorisms, Rasselas' choice of life remains inconclusive.  Worse still, a study of the response to the work throughout its life reveals that the readers of the book have interpreted this inconclusiveness, and the doctrine of the book as a whole, in widely different ways—the implied authorial attitude of the work has proved difficult to discern. These disagreements reveal some tensions in the thematic structure of the novel and in Johnson's system of morals.  The status of Johnson's novel as a literary artifact seems to work against its purported moral content.  A comprehensive interpretation of RASSELAS cannot see it as the seamless product of its author's intention.

This is an essay on eighteenth-century literary theory and on Samuel Johnson's novel THE HISTORY OF RASSELAS, PRINCE OF ABYSSINIA (1759). Johnson's literary theory as reflected in RASSELAS is examined in the light of other pronouncements on poetics by this author, and of aesthetic reflection in this period. Johnson's relationships both with classicism and with pre-Romanticism resist interpretations which disregard the tension between the author's lucidity and his dogmatism. The paper addresses the issue of the interpretation of authorial levels of intentionality, and of the traces they leave on the textual structure. In the last analysis, two different modes of textual coherence are found in Johnson's work, which result from the author's ideological and emotional conflicts.