'The Enthusiastick Fit': The Function and Fate of the Poet in Samuel Johnson's RASSELAS more

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.