...Carol J. Sklenicka Copyright © 1979 by Duke University Press 1979 Samuel Johnson and the Fiction of Activity Carol J. Sklenicka The perennial popularity of Samuel Johnson s little story book, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, would seem to testify to the pleasure it gives...

... of persuasion, and Johnson is shown to have used all three. Gwin J. Kolb s discussion of The Reception of Rasselas, 1759-1800 fills a gap hitherto strangely neglected. He first examines the reviews which were published when the book appeared, and he tells of Robert Dodsley s unsuc­ cessful suit against...

... manages to confine his misgivings to a few brave whistles in the preface. There­ after, he goes about his business with something of the confidence of the philosopher in Rasselas, who discoursed so easily on the subject of living according to nature, and with about the same success. I do not say...

... are not unlike those of Imlac in Rasselas when the maiden Pekuah was afraid to enter the pyramids because the spirits of the dead might still inhabit them: If all your fear be of apparitions, said the prince, I will promise you safety; there is no danger from the dead; he that is once buried will be seen...

... Sacks. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1964. Pp. viii, 278. $7.00. In this volume Sheldon Sacks attempts to first establish the exist­ ence of three mutually exclusive types of prose fiction satire (as in Gulliver s Travels apologue (as in Rasselas), and action...

... of the Journey and Rasselas in order to examine technique. Essays aimed primarily at Johnsonian specialists are Donald Greene s, exon­ erating Johnson from the frequent charge of being a Stoic, Jean H. Hagstrum s, explaining Johnson s ideas about concordia discors and discordia concors, and Maximillian E. Novak...

... the hanging, by which date the sermon had been printed many times. An essay by John B. Radner and another by Edward Tomarken explore Johnson s ambivalent attitude toward the Scots in his Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland', Tomarken includes a comparison of the Journey and Rasselas in order to examine...

... Sacks. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1964. Pp. viii, 278. $7.00. In this volume Sheldon Sacks attempts to first establish the exist­ ence of three mutually exclusive types of prose fiction satire (as in Gulliver s Travels apologue (as in Rasselas), and action...

... in Rasselas, who discoursed so easily on the subject of living according to nature, and with about the same success. I do not say this in any captious spirit, for I have much respect for Profes­ sor Maresca, but I cannot escape the impression that, for all his speculative fertility, he has underestimated his...

... in Rasselas may be seen in terms of his attempts to transform our customary reading habits of passive acceptance . . . into vigorous activity (p. 104). As rhetorical analyses, the seven chapters of the study, though un­ even, are well informed, compact, and perspicuous; were it not for the price, the book...

... by travel writers (138). But even if we know that the richness of Johnson s mind is what matters in Rasselas, not the form and devices by which it expresses itself, to approach that mind, it helps to know that there is in fact no other 444 The South Atlantic Quarterly important conte philosophique perhaps...

... the difficulty of a rugged science. The apprenticeship of a critic seems no less frighting to at least a few readers in every generation than the preparation of a poet seemed to Imlac s royal listener in Rasselas-. Enough! Thou hast convinced me that no human being can ever be one.19 Another set...

... so close to current prob­ lems of peace and war comes from the pages of a little book pub­ lished in the spring of 1759. The small volume, Dr. Johnson s philosophical novel Rasselas, lies mostly forgotten on our shelves today, but it illustrates clearly the fact that great literature nearly always...

... Proust. Always common in the novel for its essaic purposes, idea-characters are not characters at all, so that in Tom Jones Squire Allworthy, an idea-character, must be distinguished from Squire Western, flesh and blood. There is nothing else to call Rasselas but a novel; yet it is filled with only...

... Arnold s Dover Beach are not alien to him. And Samuel Johnson s proclamation in Rasselas that in this world there is much to be endured and little to be enjoyed applies with surprising accuracy to Styron s books. Johnson s choice of the word endure is crucial to all men who have discovered the rigor...

..., including, in 1790, Dinarbus, a continuation of Rasselas\ The greater part of her autobiography is given over to the events of her adult life, but she did record her impressions of some of the famous men whom she had seen as a child in London. Goldsmith, she wrote, was, I feel sure, very good-natured...

.... The critical principles of Rasselas are observable in The Vanity of Human Wishes. It seems a valid approach to place the ideas of such men within a coherent frame and to note their extensions, rela­ tions, and applications; by this method we raise the problem of be­ lief as it appears in both criticism...

... chiefly to muddle his mind, to blur the sound prejudices in it. ' He cannot tell you how Cato died at Utica, or who Rasselas was, or what John Stuart Mill had to say about liberty. Shade of Macaulay s schoolboy! As a corollary of his ig­ norance in these matters, he does not know what he wants in life...

... that achieve what James Clifford called slow-moving musi­ cal effects. Here is one of the many sentences in Rasselas that Clifford uses in illustration: No man can taste the fruits of autumn while he is delighting his scent with the flowers of the spring; no man can, at the same time, fill his cup from...

...: according to Meenakshi Mukher- jee, the religious allegory of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress,aswellas the moral philosophy represented by Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas and Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield were far more...