The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia

The Pleasures of Austerity

“…The princess wondered that she did not see a palace ready for her reception, and a table spread with delicacies; but, being faint and hungry, she drank the milk and eat the fruits, and thought them of a higher flavour than the products of the valley. 67 The recovery of appetite, directed in the correct and moderate way that nature intended, was a widely accepted aspiration for jaded eighteenth-century consumers weary of the pleasures of the senses, as authors from Cheyne to Johnson concluded to similar ends, if via rather different ideological and pedagogical means. The connection between physical health, diet and spiritual well-being was made in the holistic approach of George Cheyne's medical treatises but received wider cultural currency in the popular view that took hold by the end of the eighteenth century that moral corruption among the upper sorts, their luxuries and dissipations, were inscribed on their bodies, made visible through corpulence, disease and putrefaction.…”

“Canons” revisited and reviewed: Lester Kingʼs views of landscape evolution considered 50 years later

“…It has been said that ''Inconsistencies cannot both be right, but imputed to man they may both be true'' (Johnson, 1759(Johnson, [1971, p. 21), and, in discussion of old surfaces, much depends on the definition of what a surface is: is it literally the surface or the general form that is in mind? Hills (1975, p. 300) put it well when he wrote of the high plains of eastern Victoria:…”

Jane Austen the Stoic: Channeling Elizabeth Carter and the Bluestocking Ethos

“…Guided by the poet Imlac, they learn that complete fulfillment is elusive and that wisdom, denied even to those purporting to be philosophers (especially "the wise and happy man" of chapter 18), lies in limiting their desires and resting satisfied with the options available to them. 17 Austen quotes Rasselas in a passage that contrasts Fanny Price's existence at Mansfield Park with the chaos of her parents' home in Portsmouth, even as it presses the question of marriage:…”