Samuel Johnson is a giant figure for his literary production and wise conversation in British and world literature and Rasselas as his only narrative story book has largely demonstrated Johnson’s literary achievement and worldly wisdom.For centuries,although Rasselas is often classified as fiction,the debate over its genre as fiction,travel account,allegory,romance,moral discourse,and Bildungsroman,etc.never stops.However,the detailed textual and critical analysis suggests that generic mixture rather than a single genre is the actual practice in Samuel Johnson’s writing of Rasselas,which accounts for the successful representation of the author’s moral concern,the book’s philosophical theme,the readers’wide acceptance and the book’s world popularity.This paper is an attempt to look into the generic features of Rasselas and to reveal the necessary generic mixture in Rasselas on the basis of textual interpretation.
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