Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas and Newton’s Principles: A New Historicist Approach

Abstract

Literature and history have long been debated in the history of ideas. They share a common ground of being records of human achievements and imaginative creativity in two different fields. This paper is an attempt to study the relation between Johnson’s Rasselas and Newton’s Principles from a historicist point of view. It aims at illuminating certain aspects of Johnson’s artistry which seems to sugarcoat a scientist’s abstract objectivity.