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

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

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

Tom Keymer, University of Toronto
June 2004
Available
Paperback
9780521604406
$55.00
USD
Paperback
USD
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    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.

    • Reassesses Richardson's purpose of writing Clarissa in an epistolary style
    • Draws on the documented response to the first three installments of Clarissa

    Product details

    June 2004
    Paperback
    9780521604406
    296 pages
    229 × 152 × 17 mm
    0.44kg
    1 b/w illus.
    Available

    Table of Contents

    • Preface
    • A note on references and abbreviations
    • 1.Reading epistolary fiction
    • 2. Casuistry in Clarissa
    • 3. The part of the serpent
    • 4. Forensic realism
    • Postscript
    • Bibliography
    • Index.
      Author
    • Tom Keymer , University of Toronto