Samuel Richardson and the Dramatic Novel

Samuel Richardson and the Dramatic Novel
Author: Ira Konigsberg
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 152
Release: 2014-07-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0813163722

Samuel Richardson, the founder of the modern English novel, gave shape to a previously unformed literary genre. Instrumental in the development of this new art form, Ira Konigsberg contends, is the influence of the drama. Although scholars have long suspected the influence of drama on Richardson's writing, this is the first study to examine it in detail. In such matters as material, technique, and structure, Konigsberg seeks to show that Richardson found his precedents in Restoration and early eighteenth-century drama and that it was his integration of these dramatic elements with fiction which caused the mutation in genre that is responsible for the subsequent course of the English novel.

An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews

An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews
Author: Henry Fielding
Publisher:
Total Pages: 106
Release: 1926
Genre:
ISBN:

A burlesque of Richardson's "Pamela", which was generally ascribed to Fielding at the time of its appearance and held by most authorities to be by him.--Cf. W.L. Cross' "The history of Henry Fielding", v. 1, p. 23, 303-308: Notes & queries, 12th ser. v. 1, p. 24-26.

Samuel Richardson

Samuel Richardson
Author: Rudnik-Smalbraak
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2023-08-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004623485

Samuel Richardson in Context

Samuel Richardson in Context
Author: Peter Sabor
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 390
Release: 2017-09-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108327168

Since the publication of his novel Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded in 1740, Samuel Richardson's place in the English literary tradition has been secured. But how can that place best be described? Over the three centuries since embarking on his printing career the 'divine' novelist has been variously understood as moral crusader, advocate for women, pioneer of the realist novel and print innovator. Situating Richardson's work within these social, intellectual and material contexts, this new volume of essays identifies his centrality to the emergence of the novel, the self-help book, and the idea of the professional author, as well as his influence on the development of the modern English language, the capitalist economy, and gendered, medicalized, urban, and national identities. This book enables a fuller understanding and appreciation of Richardson's life, work and legacy, and points the way for future studies of one of English literature's most celebrated novelists.

Samuel Richardson's Published Commentary on Clarissa, 1747-1765 Vol 1

Samuel Richardson's Published Commentary on Clarissa, 1747-1765 Vol 1
Author: Florian Stuber
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 484
Release: 2024-10-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1040245625

This three-volume set brings together all that Samuel Richardson himself published on the composition, printing and interpretation of "Clarissa". The various short works reveal Richardson's reactions to the concerns and issues raised by contemporary readers.

Samuel Richardson's Fictions of Gender

Samuel Richardson's Fictions of Gender
Author: Tassie Gwilliam
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 218
Release: 1995
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0804725225

In developing a new gender theory for analyzing Samuel Richardson's three major novels - Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison - the author argues that these novels of sexual threat expose, sometimes unwillingly, the extraordinary labor required to construct and maintain the eighteenth-century ideology of gender, that apparently natural dream of perfect symmetry between the sexes. The instability of that model is revealed notably in Richardson's fascination with cross-gender identification and other instances of transgressive desires. The author demonstrates that these violations of the supposedly unbreachable barriers between masculinity and femininity produce what is most moving and imaginative in Richardson's fiction and create an equally powerful repression in the form of punishment of transgressive characters and desires. She also illustrates, through a reading of recurrent fantasies about the composition of bodies - especially women's bodies - the complex interaction between those fantasies and the construction of masculinity and femininity. The genesis of Richardson's own writing is located in a dynamic, reciprocal idea of gender that allows him to see femininity from the inside while retaining the privileges of the masculine viewpoint; the relation between this origin and the novels themselves forms the basis for the discussions of the novels. Each of the three chapters in the book seeks to investigate particular turn of gender construction and a particular mode of the reiterative story of sexual differences. The first chapter, on Pamela, calls on eighteenth-century discourse about opposing ideologies of gender and sexuality to elucidate Richardson's project. The next chapter, on Clarissa, shifts to a more intricate analysis of fantasies about sex and gender, in particular the double reading of masculinity and femininity in the form of of masculinity reading itself through the feminine. The final chapter, on The History of Sir Charles Grandison, examines Richardson's attempt to solidify masculinity in the person of the "good man."