Abstract
After the remarks on critics and theorists in the first chapter, it will be useful to consider Richardson’s entire prose output rather than one specific text. For it is striking how often an exceptionally large chunk of this writer’s work serves rather modest critical aims (say Grandison considered solely as a kind of men’s ‘conduct book’), or a comparably small chunk inspires such bold theoretical ones (say the role of Pamela I in the feminization of the novel). And since Richardson is so central to this study, there had best be as much of him as possible.1
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Notes
See Gerald Barker’s Sir Charles Grandison: The Compleat Conduct Book (Lewisburg, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986) and Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel, respectively.
As Alan McKillop noted long ago: ‘It is the gentility of Grandison, rather than the crude portraiture of Pamela or the tragedy of Clarissa, that set the tone for the feminine novel of the second half of the century, and established the tradition in which Jane Austen triumphed.’ Samuel Richardson, Printer and Novelist (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960), p. 213.
See T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), ch. 4, ‘Successful Printer and Editor, 1733–1739’.
See William C. Slattery, (ed.), The Richardson — Stinstra Correspondence and Stinstra’s Prefaces to Clarissa (London: Southern Illinois Press, 1969), p. 52.
See also John Carroll’s Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), pp. 39–40.
See Ira Konigsberg, Samuel Richardson and the Dramatic Novel (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1968).
Nancy Miller’s The Heroine’s Text: Readings in the French and English Novel, 1722–1782 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980) includes a provocative study of Richardson’s ‘feminocentric’ discourse.
See Michael E. Connaughton’s ‘Richardson’s Familiar Quotations: Clarissa and Bysshe’s Art of English Poetry’. Philological Quarterly, 60 (1981), pp. 858–85.
See John Carroll, Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson (1964), p. 455.
Jocelyn Harris, Samuel Richardson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 81.
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© 2001 John Skinner
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Skinner, J. (2001). Two Literary Parabolas (i): Richardson from Familiar Letters to Grandison. In: An Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Fiction. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-62946-2_4
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