Samuel Richardson (1689–1761) was an English writer, best known for his epistolary novels. He also worked as an established publisher who printed almost 500 different books and magazines. Regarded by many as a masterpiece, the novel “Clarissa; or, the History of a Young Lady” tells the story of a young woman named Clarissa Harlowe, whose way to happiness is constantly endan-gered by her own family. Pressured to marry a wealthy man, she leaves her home with Robert Lovelace. Even then she can’t ?nd peace, because Lovelace shows himself untrustworthy, spewing vague promises of marriage without any attempts to move from words to deeds.

In a series of comparative essays on a range of texts embracing both high and popular culture from the early modern era to the contemporary period, The Ideology of Genre counters both formalists and advocates of the &"death of genre,&" arguing instead for the inevitability of genre as discursive mediation. At the same time, Beebee demonstrates that genres are inherently unstable because they are produced intertextually, by a system of differences without positive terms. In short, genre is the way texts get used. To deny that genres exist is to deny, in a sense, the possibility of reading; if genres exist, on the other hand, then they exist not as essences but as differences, and thus those places within and between texts where genres &"collide&" reveal the connections between generic status, interpretive strategy, ideology, and the use-value of language.