The Fictions of Romantick Chivalry: Samuel Johnson and Romance

"Johnson's most striking romance imagery of, for instance, quest journeys, sieges, tyrants, dungeons, enchanters, phantoms, and disappearing castles, is found in the periodical essays. Moreover, networks of specifically romance connotations can often be supported by illustrations from the Dictionary. The opening landscape of the Vanity of Human Wishes is a perfect example, and is demonstrably linked to a passage in Palmerin of England. Chapter four expands the Quixote theme: Johnson was unusual in his sympathy for Quixote, and clearly identified with him. Whether exploring the seductive delusions of imagination, or actual madness, whether satirizing through mock-romance and mock-pastoral, or otherwise using the pattern of heroic aspiration followed by bathetic fall, the Vanity of Human Wishes, the periodical essays, and Rasselas are pervaded by Cervantean themes." "The popular persona of Johnson as a reductive empiricist is challenged by exploring his powerful response to romance images in every kind of literature. Criticism cannot systematize the transgressive "enchantresses of the soul" that attract the reader against his better judgment in the "illustrious depravity" of Dryden's hero Almazor, in Eloisa, Pope's erotically gothic nun, or in the "licentious variety" which makes Shakespeare irresistible. Johnson spells out his dilemma, in describing "the power of the marvelous, even over those who despise it."".