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.

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.

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.

What distinguishes Clarissa from Samuel Richardson's other novels is Richardson's unique awareness of how his plot would end. In the inevitability of its conclusion, in its engagement with virtually every category of human experience, and in its author's desire to communicate religious truth, E. Derek Taylor suggests, Clarissa truly is the Paradise Lost of the eighteenth century. Arguing that Clarissa's cohesiveness and intellectual rigor have suffered from the limitations of the Lockean model frequently applied to the novel, Taylor turns to the writings of John Norris, a well-known disciple of the theosophy of Nicolas Malebranche. Allusions to this first of Locke's philosophical critics appear in each of the novel's installments, and Taylor persuasively documents how Norris's ideas provided Richardson with a usefully un-Lockean rhetorical grounding for Clarissa. Further, the writings of early feminists like Norris's intellectual ally Mary Astell, who viewed her arguments on behalf of women as compatible with her conservative and deeply held religious and political views, provide Richardson with the combination of progressive feminism and conservative theology that animate the novel. In a convincing twist, Taylor offers a closely argued analysis of Lovelace's oft-stated declaration that he will not be 'out-Norris'd' or 'out-plotted' by Clarissa, showing how the plot of the novel and the plot of all humans exist, in the context of Richardson's grand theological experiment, within, through, and by a concurrence of divine energy.

This fascinating study examines Samuel Richardson's letters as important works of authorial self-fashioning. It analyses the development of his epistolary style; the links between his own letter-writing practice and that of his fictional protagonists; how his correspondence is highly conscious of the spectrum of publicity; and how he constructed his letter collections to form an epistolary archive for posterity. Looking backwards to earlier epistolary traditions, and forwards, to the emergence of the lives-in-letters mode of biography, the book places Richardson's correspondence in a historical continuum. It explores how the eighteenth century witnesses a transition, from a period in which an author would rarely preserve personal papers to a society in which the personal lives of writers become privileged as markers of authenticity in the expanded print market. It argues that Richardson's letters are shaped by this shifting relationship between correspondence and publicity in the mid-eighteenth century.

Recycling is not a concept that is usually applied to the eighteenth century. “The environment” may not have existed as a notion then, yet practices of re-use and transformation obviously shaped the early-modern world. Still, this period of booming commerce and exchange was also marked by scarcity and want. This book reveals the fascinating variety and ingenuity of recycling processes that may be observed in the commerce, crafts, literature, and medicine of the eighteenth century. Recycling is used as a thought-provoking means to revisit subjects such as consumption, the new science, or novel writing, and cast them in a new light where the waste of some becomes the luxury of others, clothes worn to rags are turned into paper and into books, and scientific breakthroughs are carried out in old kitchen pans.

Linking the decline in Church authority in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries with the increasing respectability of fiction, Carol Stewart provides a new perspective on the rise of the novel. The resulting readings of novels by authors such as Samuel Richardson, Sarah Fielding, Frances Sheridan, Charlotte Lennox, Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne, William Godwin, and Jane Austen trace the translation of ethical debate into secular and gendered terms. Stewart argues that the seventeenth-century debate about ethics that divided Latitudinarians and Calvinists found its way into novels of the eighteenth century. Her book explores the growing belief that novels could do the work of moral reform more effectively than the Anglican Church, with attention to related developments, including the promulgation of Anglican ethics in novels as a response to challenges to Anglican practice and authority. An increasingly legitimate genre, she argues, offered a forum both for investigating the situation of women and challenging patriarchal authority, and for challenging the dominant political ideology.

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.

Eighteenth-century British literary history was long characterized by two central and seemingly discrete movements—the emergence of the novel and the development of Romantic lyric poetry. In fact, recent scholarship reveals that these genres are inextricably bound: constructions of interiority developed in novels changed ideas about what literature could mean and do, encouraging the new focus on private experience and self-perception developed in lyric poetry. In Lyric Generations, Gabrielle Starr rejects the genealogy of lyric poetry in which Romantic poets are thought to have built solely and directly upon the works of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. She argues instead that novelists such as Richardson, Haywood, Behn, and others, while drawing upon earlier lyric conventions, ushered in a new language of self-expression and community which profoundly affected the aesthetic goals of lyric poets. Examining the works of Cowper, Smith, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats in light of their competitive dialogue with the novel, Starr advances a literary history that considers formal characteristics as products of historical change. In a world increasingly defined by prose, poets adapted the new forms, characters, and moral themes of the novel in order to reinvigorate poetic practice.