Richardson's Clarissa and the eighteenth-century reader

Resource Information

The work Richardson's Clarissa and the eighteenth-century reader represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in European University Institute Library. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Richardson's Clarissa and the eighteenth-century reader

Statement of responsibility

Tom Keymer

Title variation

Richardson's 'Clarissa' & the Eighteenth-Century Reader

Creator

• Keymer, Tom

Subject

• Books and reading -- Great Britain -- History -- 18th century
• Epistolary fiction, English -- History and criticism
• Rape victims in literature
• Reader-response criticism
• Richardson, Samuel, 1689-1761
• Women and literature -- England -- History -- 18th century
• Authors and readers -- Great Britain -- History -- 18th century

Language

eng

Summary

Written as a collection of letters in which very different accounts of the action are unsupervised by sustained authorial comment, Richardson's novel Clarissa offers an extreme example of the capacity of narrative to give the reader final responsibility for resolving or construing meaning. It is paradoxical then that its author was a writer committed to avowedly didactic goals. Tom Keymer counters the tendency of recent critics to suggest that Clarissa's textual indeterminacy defeats these goals by arguing that Richardson pursues subtler and more generous means of educating his readers by making them 'if not Authors, Carvers' of the text. Discussing Richardson's use of the epistolary form throughout his career, Keymer goes on to focus in detail on the three instalments in which Clarissa was first published, drawing on the documented responses of its first readers to illuminate his technique as a writer and set the novel in its contemporary ethical, political and ideological context.--

Member of

• Cambridge studies in eighteenth-century English literature and thought, 13

Assigning source

Provided by publisher

Cataloging source

UkCbUP

Index

index present

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

dictionaries

Series statement

• Cambridge studies in eighteenth-century English literature and thought
• Cambridge Social Sciences eBooks
• ACLS Humanities E-Book

Series volume

13