Samuel Johnson

Rasselas (eBook, ePUB)

Prince of Abyssinia

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

While the story is thematically similar to Candide by Voltaire, also published early in 1759 - both concern young men travelling in the company of honoured teachers, encountering and examining human suffering in an attempt to determine the root of happiness - their root concerns are distinctly different. Voltaire was very directly satirising the widely read philosophical work by Gottfried Leibniz, particularly the Theodicee, in which Leibniz asserts that the world, no matter how we may perceive it, is necessarily the "best of all possible worlds". In contrast the question Rasselas confronts most directly is whether or not humanity is essentially capable of attaining happiness. Writing as a devout Christian, Johnson makes through his characters no blanket attacks on the viability of a religious response to this question, as Voltaire does, and while the story is in places light and humorous, it is not a piece of satire, as is Candide.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Dead Dodo Classic Press
• Seitenzahl: 153
• Erscheinungstermin: 12. November 2015
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781518304538
• Artikelnr.: 55962868

Autorenporträt

Samuel Johnson was an English writer who was born on September 18, 1709, and died on December 13, 1784. He was called "Dr. Johnson" by many people. He was a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, critic, biographer, editor, and lexicographer. According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, he was "possibly the most famous writer in English history." Johnson became famous in his later years, and after he died, more and more people thought he had a lasting effect on literary criticism. Some even said he was the only truly great critic of English literature. In the 20th century, his ideas shaped the way people thought about literature, and his influence on biography will last for a long time. Johnson's Dictionary had a big impact on Modern English, and it was the best dictionary until the Oxford English Dictionary came along 150 years later. The biographer of Samuel Johnson, Walter Jackson Bate, chose James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson as "the most famous single work of biographical art in all of literature."