Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Conclusion In Which Nothingness Is Concluded, Marissa Rimes

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Samuel Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia is ironically most often classified as an “oriental philosophic tale,” but is rarely analyzed from the point of view of oriental philosophy. Although Buddhism’s ambiguities, inwardness, and nothingness, provoke anxiety in Western critique, Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia does something unique from eighteenth-century British thought in that it disavows this Buddaphobia by actively employing a similar line of thought. Through the lens of a Buddhist framework many of the text’s renownedly gloomy implications, in regard to its circular structure and inconclusiveness, are freed from the great sludge of …