Abstract
This chapter is an analysis of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa as a study of the process of the transformation of the English society from an oral to a literate community and of a tragic predicament of the literate individual, who, in the words of Marshall McLuhan, is inescapably “a split man, a schizophrenic” (The Gutenberg Galaxy. The Making of Typographic Man, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962, 22). In the novel Richardson creates a whole spectrum of characters with varying levels of literacy who manifest the heightened awareness of the media of communication. The novel’s protagonists, Clarissa Harlowe and Robert Lovelace, have the highest levels of literacy, which is simultaneously their source of emancipation from the rules of community life, of their empowerment and of their weakness.
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Notes
- 1.
Unless indicated otherwise, all the quotations from Clarissa come from Samuel Richardson 2004 [1985]. Clarissa. Or, The History of a Young Lady. Edited by Angus Ross. London: Penguin Books.
- 2.
Quoted from Samuel Richardson. 1902. Clarissa Harlowe; or The History of a Young Lady. Volume IX. (Third edition.) London: Chapman & Hall, p. 227. This is one of fourteen fragments which Richardson added to Anna’s letter in the third edition and which are not included in Angus Ross’s edition. Their function was, as Shirley Van Marter explained, “eulogizing her character and actions” (1975, 12).
- 3.
Quoted from Samuel Richardson. 1902. Clarissa Harlowe; or The History of a Young Lady. Volume IX. (Third edition.) London: Chapman & Hall, pp. 241–242.
- 4.
Quoted from Samuel Richardson. 1902. Clarissa Harlowe; or The History of a Young Lady. Volume IX. (Third edition.) London: Chapman & Hall, p. 241.
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Maciulewicz, J. (2018). From Orality to Script: Literacy, Autonomy and Authority in Clarissa. In: Representations of Book Culture in Eighteenth-Century English Imaginative Writing. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92609-4_2
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