#History of Rasselas

[alexesguerra]

The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia USED:Rare Collectible Mass Market Paperback in Good Condition with light wear on cover. ISBN: 9780140431087 Contributor(s): Johnson, Samuel (Author), Enright, D J (Editor) Publisher: Penguin Books Pub Date: February 24, 1977 Rasselas compresses everything that puts Dr Johnson among the great lions of English literature and life into this text

[sanjogsonsand]

" Distance has the same effect on the mind as on the eyes. "

~ Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia.

27No23

[talesofpassingtime]

From those early marriages proceeds likewise the rivalry of parents and children. The son is eager to enjoy the world before the father is willing to forsake it, and there is hardly room at once for two generations. The daughter begins to bloom before the mother can be content to fade, and neither can forbear to wish for the absence of the other.

— Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas  

[dreams-of-mutiny]

MORTIMER ADLER’S READING LIST (PART 2)

Reading list from “How To Read a Book” by Mortimer Adler (1972 edition).

Alexander Pope: Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man

Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu: Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws

Voltaire: Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary

Henry Fielding: Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones

Samuel Johnson: The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets

David Hume: Treatise on Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: On the Origin of Inequality; On the Political Economy; Emile, The Social Contract

Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy

Adam Smith: The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations

Immanuel Kant: Critique of Pure Reason; Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace

Edward Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography

James Boswell: Journal; Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D.

Antoine Laurent Lavoisier: Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry)

Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison: Federalist Papers

Jeremy Bentham: Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust; Poetry and Truth

Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier: Analytical Theory of Heat

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Phenomenology of Spirit; Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History

William Wordsworth: Poems

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poems; Biographia Literaria

Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice; Emma

Carl von Clausewitz: On War

Stendhal: The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love

Lord Byron: Don Juan

Arthur Schopenhauer: Studies in Pessimism

Michael Faraday: Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity

Charles Lyell: Principles of Geology

Auguste Comte: The Positive Philosophy

Honore de Balzac: Père Goriot; Eugenie Grandet

Ralph Waldo Emerson: Representative Men; Essays; Journal

Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter

Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America

John Stuart Mill: A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography

Charles Darwin: The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography

Charles Dickens: Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times

Claude Bernard: Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine

Henry David Thoreau: Civil Disobedience; Walden

Karl Marx: Capital; Communist Manifesto

George Eliot: Adam Bede; Middlemarch

Herman Melville: Moby-Dick; Billy Budd

Fyodor Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov

Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary; Three Stories

Henrik Ibsen: Plays

Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales

Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger

William James: The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism

Henry James: The American; ‘The Ambassadors

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals; The Will to Power

Jules Henri Poincare: Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method

Sigmund Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis

George Bernard Shaw: Plays and Prefaces

Max Planck: Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory; Where Is Science Going?; Scientific Autobiography

Henri Bergson: Time and Free Will; Matter and Memory; Creative Evolution; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion

John Dewey: How We Think; Democracy and Education; Experience and Nature; Logic; the Theory of Inquiry

Alfred North Whitehead: An Introduction to Mathematics; Science and the Modern World; The Aims of Education and Other Essays; Adventures of Ideas

George Santayana: The Life of Reason; Skepticism and Animal Faith; Persons and Places

Lenin: The State and Revolution

Marcel Proust: Remembrance of Things Past

Bertrand Russell: The Problems of Philosophy; The Analysis of Mind; An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth; Human Knowledge, Its Scope and Limits

Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain; Joseph and His Brothers

Albert Einstein: The Meaning of Relativity; On the Method of Theoretical Physics; The Evolution of Physics

James Joyce: ‘The Dead’ in Dubliners; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses

Jacques Maritain: Art and Scholasticism; The Degrees of Knowledge; The Rights of Man and Natural Law; True Humanism

Franz Kafka: The Trial; The Castle

Arnold J. Toynbee: A Study of History; Civilization on Trial

Jean Paul Sartre: Nausea; No Exit; Being and Nothingness

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The First Circle; The Cancer Ward

Source: mortimer-adlers-reading-list

[realityhop]

"Be not too hasty to trust or to admire the teachers of morality: they discourse like angels, but they live like men."

— Imlac in Samuel Johnson's The History of Rasselas: Prince of Abyssinia (1759)

[swede1952]

Good morning. 🏺🏺🏺

2 September 2023

Memories, how far back do they go? Pretty far, I think. Some of my earliest memories are piecemeal. I remember having a chalkboard and pretending to write on the board. I was imitating my parents of course. I remember the sound of an oil pump outside a bedroom window, which would be at my grandparents' home in Texas. I remember watching Frankenstein (1931 version) with my mother on TV, I think I must have been two because my oldest brother wasn't yet in the picture. These I believe are genuine memories, though now they are merely snapshots without detail, and I only remember because I recall the memories once in a while, so the connections still exist.

“Distance has the same effect on the mind as on the eye.” - Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia

[eva-does-its-best]

Day 15 HrT, despite not noticing many changes yet and having routined it finally in an automatic manner I must say it is working.

In an almost imperceptible way it is working. I feel good, relieved, confident, stable and many more things without even thinking about it. It's just there.

Sadly exam season is also almost here so my mood is going to swing af. Fuck you Chomski, fuck you terf-o-woke teachers who teach history in the most unappealing way possible.

I love you April Raintree, I love you Rasselas Prince of Abyssinia. I hate you yellow wallpaper and baby blue eyes. I hate you with all my heart virginia woolf you hypocrite coward but into the lighthouse was fun to read I will admit.

Aight back to reading neuromancer and frege my beloved. Buh bye tumblerers and other voices of the perturbed psyche within the void.

[willowhillhistory]

The Happy Valley, by Harriet Beecher Stowe

Published in The Christian Union, 27 Park Place, NY, on August 7, 1872:

The terrible heats of the last few weeks have sent our city population flying "thick as the leaves of Vallombrosa," and we among them have been swept in the tide up the Hudson to Albany, and then up, up a long, slow grade in a palace-car at night, feeling ourselves ascending, and the unmistakable vivid clearness of mountain air blowing refreshment through us, till finally, after passing Sharon Springs, we stopped in Cherry Valley.

Where is Cherry Valley? If we thought our telling would bring all the world to see, we would stop here and now, and not utter a word; for the charm of Cherry Valley is its greenness, its seclusion, its pastoral stillness and quietude, its Arcadian air of unworldly rest and peace.

It might be a valley in the Delectable Mountains that Bunyan writes of, whence in a clear day you should see the battlements of the Celestial City; it might be the happy valley of Rasselas, or any other dreamland where it is always afternoon.

To come down to prose, Cherry Valley is in that belt of hill country that overlooks the valley of the Mohawk. It is said to be 1,300 feet above tidewater mark. It is a quaint old place, with what many places in America are destitute of - a history. Here are farms and homesteads that have been in the possession of the same families for one, two, and three generations, and a rich moss of tradition has grown up under their quiet shades. Here are streets, of those lovely, cool, roomy, breezy old houses that people knew how to build a generation ago, and that have hanging about them a fragrance of old days and old times, like the rosemary from a cabinet.

One such mansion we visited lately, standing on a high green hill, and overlooking a lovely landscape of hill and dale and woodland. The house is in that best style of architecture and keeping - that which suggests that its inmates are having a good time in it, and mean to use every bit of it for household enjoyment. You come through a quaint little garden, bright with all the nice old-fashioned flowers, and the old house stands back of it, like a good grandmother, with its arms wide open to take you in. A broad veranda of generous proportions leads to the open hall door. Then you come on that great, wide, generous front-hall, wherein they of old time delighted, - a hall wide enough to live in, set out with old-fashioned sofas and ottomans and tables and chairs, with a tall old clock gently ticking away the peaceful hours. From this hall open pleasant rooms in all the four corners; one large charming parlor, whose windows look out on the beautiful hill-and-valley picture below the house. Here you find cozy family rocking chairs and easy chairs, that look as if they may have cuddled generations - chairs, not stiff and new out of upholsterers' shops, but chairs that are used to entertaining, and half-alive with a hospitable tenderness, and that seem to long to have you sit down and rest in them where others have rested before you. At the further end of the hall is a quaint old staircase, leading to an upper hall of the same dimensions with the lower, and on which all the chambers open. This upper hall is set about with couches, and little stands and tables convenient for books and work, and is the undress family reunion room. It opens by a wide window on to the roof of the veranda, which forms an ample and sunny [illegible], and commands a lovely prospect.

Here an ancient couple, old in years, but young in heart, keep tryst and rendezvous for a generation or two of grandchildren and greatgrandchildren, who probably regard it as the veritable Garden of Eden.

Stories of the past grow thick and blossom here in many a tender tradition. Cherry Valley was yet a youthful settlement when the Revolutionary War began, and was made the victim of that insane and unprincipled measure of the then dominant party in England, which did not hesitate to stir up and set upon these infant settlements the wild and bloody ravages of the forest. The valley of the Mohawk was the camping ground of the Six Nations - now melted away, and gone like the night-dews; and in one of their marauding raids they wholly destroyed Cherry Valley, burned the houses, massacred some of the people, and swept others into a bitter captivity.

This peaceful, lovely house, with its flower gardens and bowers of rest, stands right upon one of the spots of these night tragedies. The whole family was murdered, and the house burned to the ground.

It is curious to see how the tragedy and terror and agony of the past, toned down by time and distance, come to add only a softened interest, a charm of romance, to the scenes of to-day. Everywhere in Cherry Valley we are pointed to places and scenes made memorable by these tragedies. In one hospitable mansion, while a gay party were promenading the well-kept grounds, a tree was shown in which it was said the mangled arm of a lady had been found, thrown there by the Indians. The story is told of another woman taken captive, to whom was allotted as her first work the task of stretching and drying the scalps of some of her own kindred who had perished; and another of a woman who, with her three little children, lay under the shelter of a hollow log, while the Indians ran backward and forward over it, filling them with constant horror of discovery. In the grave-yard is the tomb-stone of one who as a boy was with his mother taken captive and carried to Canada, while all the rest of the family were slaughtered. We need to recall these traditions to see how real and how terrible was the Revolutionary struggle of our fathers.

It ought to be in justice remembered, when we think of the barbarity of this movement, that Lord Chatham and William Pitt put all their force against this policy.

In our childhood, we remember, our blood used to boil and our veins tingle when we read in the Columbian Orator the speech of Lord Chatham on the policy of employing the Indians against the colonists of North America, and it is a comfort to know that all of the indignation, wrath, and denunciation that the English language could possibly carry was spent upon the party which perpetrated this inhumanity. It is a pity Lord Chatham's speech has vanished from our reading-books, for it is one of the most splendid specimens of generous, indignant eloquence that the language affords.

Cherry Valley to-day is an innocent, quiet Arcadia, lying within an hour's distance of three of the most fashionable summer watering-places, so that a short ride may bring you in sight of all the pomps and vanities that one may desire to see. Sharon Springs and Richfield now rival Saratoga in attraction, and number their thousand. Cooperstown is another most attractive and much frequented point.

[...]

The hospitality of Cherry Valley is proverbial. Lawn-teas, pic-nics and croquet parties vary the summer days; everybody seems to know everybody, and a stranger is taken in and made to feel at home at once. We have heard that it is still safe to go to sleep there as it was in Litchfield, in our childhood, with outside doors and windows innocently wide open for the moon to shine in. If it be so, we shall not tell of it, lest an army of New York scalawags should take passage at once on the palace-car to Cherry Valley. These palace-cars from Albany to Cherry Valley are in fact no small feature in the attractions of getting there. You don't want to be pounded and squeezed and made a cinder-bank of, so that your own clothes abhor you, in getting to the garden of Eden itself.

This idea seems to have taken possession of the minds of those who are charged with taking you from Albany to Sharon and Cherry Valley, for they provide cars so elegant, and easy, and every way delightful, that it is worth going just to get the ride in them, even if you had no purpose of doing anything more.

One begins to respect one's self when one rides in such luxury, and to consider that one belongs to the royal family of America, and conduct one's self accordingly. Instead of having your eyes put out and your traveling dress soiled with cinders, a wire-gauze window admits light and air, and affords perfect protection.

Ah, well-a-day! These nice palace-cars had but one fault in our eyes. They took us from Cherry Valley as well as to it. We had been there only ten days, and yet such pleasant ones that, as the Irishman said, we were all ready to become a native. And we looked back on its green peaceful retreats with something of a sigh. Why can't we always live in these pleasant places? Why can't all the pleasant people live there just where we can see them every day?

Well, in some other world there will be brighter and better reflections of these lower places, and all those who come shall come to stay, and go no more out forever. Then, in those valleys of greenness, the Good Shepherd shall walk and gather together in one those that are gone, and those that are going, and us that wait and long.

In these summer journeyings we see so many people who are walking in sorrow; so many living, when some great shock, some life-sorrow has cut the nerves of earthly joy, never again to reunite. Well, patience, dear fellow-travelers; if there were not something better than this life for you to turn to, the dear Lord would never have cut the cords that bind you here; but these sorrows are heavenly voices saying to the soul, "Rise up, my love, my fair one, come away, for, lo, the winter is over and past, and the time of singing of birds has come."

[Thanks to Sydney Waller for providing me with a photocopy of this article.]

[chattering-magpie-uk]

Nick Harkaway - a quotation from Gnomon

Am I a fraud, then, or a scholar? I am both, of course, as we all are. Half of what I know I do not believe. Half of what I believe I cannot prove. For the rest, I hope to muddle through and my mistakes go without comment. Samuel Johnson – a quotation from the History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia Erasmus (paraphrased quotation) Weltanschauung – Môn vision du monde Statement on Independent…

[elizabethanism]

"Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful."

Samuel Johnson

The History of Rasselas

[spudlanyon]

for my purposes, the referenced texts E.M. Forster made in his book, The Aspects of the Novel.

William George Clark. Gazpacho: Or Summer Months in Spain. —. Peloponnesus: Notes of Study and Travel. —. The Works of William Shakespeare - Cambridge Edition. —. The Present Dangers of the Church of England. John Bunyan. The Pilgrim's Progress. Walter Pater. Marius the Epicurean. Edward John Trelawny. Adventures of a Younger Son. Daniel Defoe. A Journal of the Plague Year. —. Robinson Crusoe. —. Moll Flanders. Max Beerbohm. Zuleika Dobson. Samuel Johnson. The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia. James Joyce. Ulysses. —. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. William Henry Hudson. Green Mansions. Herman Melville. Moby Dick. —. "Billy Budd". Elizabeth Gaskell. Cranford (followed by My Lady Ludlow, and Mr. Harrison's Confessions). Charlotte Brontë. Jane Eyre. —. Shirley. —. Villette. Sir Walter Scott. The Heart of Midlothian (part of the Waverley Novels). —. The Antiquary (part of the Waverley Novels). —. The Bride of Lammermoor (part of the Waverley Novels). George Meredith. The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. —. The Egoist. —. Evan Harrington. —. The Adventures of Harry Richmond. —. Beauchamp's Career. Leo Tolstoy. War and Peace. Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Brothers Karamazov. William Shakespeare. King Lear. Henry Fielding. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. —. Joseph Andrews. Henry De Vere Stacpoole. The Blue Lagoon (part of a trilogy; followed by The Garden of God and The Gates of Morning). Clayton Meeker Hamilton. Materials and Methods of Fiction. George Eliot. The Mill on the Floss. —. Adam Bede. Robert Louis Stevenson. The Master of Ballantrae. Edward Bulwer-Lytton. The Last Days of Pompeii. Charles Dickens. Great Expectations. —. Our Mutual Friend. —. Bleak House. Laurence Stern. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Virginia Woolf. To the Lighthouse. T. S. Eliot. The Sacred Wood.

One Thousand and One Nights. Emily Brontë. Wuthering Heights. Charles Percy Sanger. The Structure of Wuthering Heights. Johan David Wyss. The Swiss Family Robinson. D. H. Lawrence. Women in Love. Arnold Bennett. The Old Wives' Tale. Anthony Trollope. The Last Chronicle of Barset. Jane Austen. Emma. —. Mansfield Park. —. Persuasion. H. G. Wells. Tono-Bungay. —. Boon. Gustave Flaubert. Madame Bovary. Percy Lubbock. The Craft of Fiction. —. Roman Pictures. André Gide. The Counterfeiters. Homer. Odyssey. Thomas Hardy. The Return of the Native. —. The Dynasts. —. Jude the Obscure. Anton Chekhov. The Cherry Orchard. Oliver Goldsmith. The Vicar of Wakefield. David Garnett. Lady Into Fox. Alexander Pope. The Rape of the Lock. Norman Matson. Flecker's Magic. Samuel Richardson. Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded. Anatole France. Thaïs. Henry James. The Ambassadors. —. The Spoils of Poynton. —. Portrait of a Lady. —. What Maisie Knew. —. The Wings of the Dove. Jean Racine. Plays.

I. A. Richards.

[talesofpassingtime]

In the state of future perfection, to which we all aspire, there will be pleasure without danger, and security without restraint.

— Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas 

[elisaenglish]

Everything starts at the beginning. Linear narratives, cause and effect, temporal practice – at least, as far as we know. Birth. Death. Cycles, perhaps. But we move. Eventually to shuffle out of existence or, more optimistically, transmute into other matters entirely.

Origin and endpoint so connected, it would be easy to subscribe to a similarly simplistic interpretation of art. That, and its synecdochical soul. However, as Anaïs Nin writes:

“We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.”

Tethered to complex phenomenology and – paradoxically – freed by it, human experience, by this measure, defies strict categorisation. We are as we are in the moment, and flooded through the successive days, generation by generation, we choose. Even in this world increasingly predicated on the synthetic machinations of algorithmic “thinking”, we enter the fray as we will, immerse ourselves for a time in the passions – and disappointments – of our daily theatre.

Such, you could argue, is life – distinct from metaphor, unscripted.

But what, then, of literature? Of sources? Of lessons? Or at least, the didactic appropriation of canonical legacies as pertaining to us in the present. Then and now, and bridging. Elegantly executed in some cases, tragic by virtue of the misreading in others.

And yes, there are right and wrong answers in English. Just because the author dies, so to speak, it doesn’t mean you can shoehorn anything in there to replace them. After all, possibility doesn’t have to be palatable, but it does have to be true.

True as in plausible, robustly evidenced, debated with integrity of intent – even on an amateur level.

Take, for example, Jane Eyre. In chapter 7, Jane is punished by Mr Brocklehurst via a targeted humiliation that requires her to be “exposed to general view on a pedestal of infamy” as he brands her a “liar.” So condemned, he orders that she do penance upon the stool for “half an hour longer” and “let no one speak to her during the remainder of the day.” A fate that Brontë presents as making her burn with shame.

Pictured above in a rendering of the infamous scene, the artist depicts the stool as a column upon which Jane becomes a stylite fashioned in conceptual terms after Fra Angelico’s fifteenth-century fresco, The Mocking of Christ. The scourges of Lowood hover in ubiquitous threat, tools not unlike those of the biblical Passion: the bundle of twigs used as an instrument of flagellation, the scissors symbolic of the girls’ censored reduction to silence, starvation, capitulation – each at the behest of a man defined, in bleak refrain, as a “rigid” pillar ominously coloured black.

Religiosity framed in such cruel and unforgiving terms is not unfamiliar territory, especially in post-Enlightenment novels that aim, at least in part, to challenge historic social customs. The imagery here, for instance, foreshadows the allegorical overlap with the scaffold on which Hester Prynne is paraded in service of denouncing her sexual malfeasance in The Scarlet Letter. Except the meaning here is heightened not by primacy of self or the aesthetics of authenticity Hawthorne navigates as the feminine sphere triumphs over the masculine deficit embodied by the feeble Dimmesdale, but through, instead, the pure communion between Jane and unfailingly stoic Helen Burns.

Contrasted in the starkest terms with Brocklehurst, Helen represents a mode of Christianity that stresses endurance and the ascetic devotion to faith. Partially conveyed via her interest in Rasselas – an apologue that illustrates how one’s surrender and self-control is the means by which one may bear any mortal difficulty – and, perhaps more so, through her subsequent death, Helen is a paragon of nineteenth-century piety, able to withstand any trial when the pains of this life are immaterial compared to the joys she anticipates experiencing in the next.

So the scene shifts, vibrates with a shared belief that cannot be dislodged by the precepts of oppressive hypocrisy or the moral narcissism keenly observed in men like Brocklehurst. Brontë writes:

“What my sensations were, no language can describe; but, just as they all rose, stifling my breath and constricting my throat, a girl came up and passed me: in passing, she lifted her eyes. What a strange light inspired them! What an extraordinary sensation that ray sent through me! How the new feeling bore me up! It was as if a martyr, a hero, had passed a slave or victim, and imparted strength in the transit. I mastered the rising hysteria, lifted my head, and took a firm stand on the stool.”

Thus Jane contains her emotions and resists the cognitive conditioning meted out as “learning” in this environment cast as little better than her abusive “home” at Gateshead. Read in context, we see the impact of a quiet response – not naively consigned as weakness by a feminist lens, nor bowed to patriarchy in any conventional sense, but as an imperative of human dignity and self-respect regardless of ideological norms or, indeed, their injustices.

To circle back to the beginning once more, it should be stated that literature, and its intersection with the arts as a whole, is much like history and the study thereof – it must be approached with an evaluative eye lest we compromise intellectual credibility and kowtow to destructively unbalanced readings – readings that deny reasoned critique and mould themselves to agenda-driven politics.

Stories are our defining essence as a species; we must have the fortitude and discipline to both dissect and protect them. The skill to excavate the sometimes inconvenient truth, the conviction to challenge the uninterrogated assumptions.

Just as Jane comes to understand that happiness is a matter of degree, the significance of literary study is only truly captured in its nuances. Its plurality of perspectives, if you will. To return to Nin, she writes:

“If one’s lens is too small to fit the mysteries of one complex life, if that life must be condemned, what in the critic’s own complex psyche do they condemn and attempt to destroy?”

Therein lies the truth. Therein lies the question. And still, we push. Part as air to fire, part as air to breathing.

[theclassicsreader]

...knowledge is more than equivalent to force.

Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia

[someones-reading-list]

Fall 2019: British Literature 1750-1800

James Reeves - Texas State University

Course theme: The global Eighteenth Century

Reading list:

Anonymous: The Woman of Colour: A Tale

Vincent Carretta (ed.): Unchained Voices

William Earle: Obi; or, The History of Three-Fingered Jack

Eliza Haywood: The Adventured of Eovaai

Laurence Sterne: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy

Ancillary materials:

William Cowper: “The Castaway”

Samuel Johnson: Rasselas

Phillis Wheatley: An Elegiac Poem, “To the King’s Most Excellent Majesty”, “On Being Brought from Africa to America”, “A Hymn to the Morning”, “A Hymn to the Evening”, “On Imagination”, “To the Earl of Dartmouth”, “To a Young African Painter”, “To His Excellency General Washington”

James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw: A Narrative of the Life

Ignatius Sancho: Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho

Olaudah Equiano: The Interesting Narrative

Frances Sheridan: The History of Nourjahad

Samuel Foote: The Nabob