Rasselas’s genre

• Most often called an Oriental tale, or a type of satire, or a philosophical fable. 
• Modeled on Arabian Nights – the vision of an exotic world, contrasting with Europe.
• Also a Biblical influence—Christian fable about the fallen world without guarantees of happiness
• Allegory of life as a journey on a road with many choices of direction—there are alternatives, but none are desirable and simple choices are impossible

Abysinnia

• African; Ethiopia—the Nile, Cairo...
• Rasselas originally titled The Prince of Abyssinia; “Rassela Christos” was a character in Lobo’s text
• Johnson had translated Father Lobo’s A Voyage to Abyssinia—a Portuguese Jesuit, and praised it as factual—not fanciful.
• Also the abyss? which Johnson’s Dictionary defines as “a depth without bottom; a great depth; in a figurative sense, that in which anything is lost”; the attempt to find the lost object carries you into the abyss—dreary desolation—emptiness and horror
• These characters are black, yet Johnson makes absolutely no reference to this... there is an element of the fantasy, the fantastic, the Orientalist/exotic but Johnson insists on the characters being simply human, us, everyone, everybody everywhere

In his 1978 book Orientalism, the literary critic Edward Said defines 'Orientalism,' as "a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient's special place in European Western experience." Said writes that "the Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe's greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilization and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of “the Other.” In addition, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West)."
 
Eighteenth-century England used the term "Orient" to describe the Middle East, Asia, and Africa—regions it had colonized.  Representations of these regions and cultures abound in the fiction of the era. Oriental tales included escapist fantasies, social critiques, stoical moral treatises, and philosophical meditations upon "universal human nature," making varying uses of "the Orient" as counterpoint to England.
 
Said's view is that oriental tales and orientalist scholarship say more about Britain—its ideal self-definitions, its anxieties, its assumptions about world and cosmic order—than about "the Orient." 
 
The astounding popularity that The Thousand and One Nights enjoyed in Europe from the start can be traced to the "oriental" yearnings that had been growing among Western writers, artists and readers ever since the days of the Crusades. The public found in these tales an element of romance and adventure that was missing from European literature. The Thousand and One Nights was partly responsible for the composition of travel works like Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, Rasselas.
 
Said argues that Orientalism can be found in current Western depictions of "Arab" cultures. The depictions of "the Arab" as irrational, menacing, untrustworthy, anti-Western, dishonest, and--perhaps most importantly--prototypical, are ideas into which Orientalist scholarship has evolved. This dynamic has become obviously important in our culture today.  These notions are trusted as foundations for both ideologies and policies developed by the Occident. Said writes: "The hold these instruments have on the mind is increased by the institutions built around them. For every Orientalist, quite literally, there is a support system of staggering power, considering the ephemerality of the myths that Orientalism propagates. The system now culminates into the very institutions of the state. … Orientalism as a dogma that not only degrades its subject matter but also blinds its practitioners."
 
Questions: 

• How does Rasselas’s Orientalism influence its meaning?  (How would the story’s meaning be different if “the happy Valley” was located in England, and the Prince/Princess traveled around to Ireland and/or Scotland instead of the Orient?)
• Why did Johnson set his tale in an Orientalist setting? 
• Is Samuel Johnson offering Rasselas as an alternative to the Orientalist text as a romance of adventure and passion?   I.e., introduction:  “de-romanticizing highflown and ignorantly optimistic ideas about life, and only secondarily deflating the expectations set up by a tale about the mysterious East” (10)
•  Johnson wrote Rasselas in one week, possibly to defray expenses and express his sense of loss after his mother’s death in January 1759.  How might setting his tale in the Orient served as a strategy to enhance the appeal of the book?  Might readers of the 18th century been enticed by the Oriental setting?

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