SOURCE: "The Narrative Architecture of Rasselas," in The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual, Vol. 3, edited by Paul J. Korshin, AMS Press, Inc., 1990, pp. 91-111.

In the following essay, Braverman examines the significance of architectural structures as well as interior and spiritual spaces in Rasselas.

More than twenty years ago, Paul Fussell noted the prevalence of architectural imagery in the writing of the major Augustan humanists. Writers from Swift to Burke, he observed, had found in the "architectural image-system" a way of expressing "the role of forethought, arrangement, will, and order in the self-construction of the human imagination …" Fussell went on from there to suggest that

If we could learn to pay less attention to what eighteenth-century writers say they are doing and more to what they actually do, I think we should find that instead of being devoted to the Horatian formula ut pictura poesis, as they...