Author: Lois E. Bueler Publisher: University of Delaware Press ISBN: 9780874134964 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 194
Book Description
This study also examines the connections among the plots: how Clarissa's self-scrutinizing response to the pressures of test and trial, and her refusal to achieve respectability at the expense of her integrity, is explained by her pursuit of Christian prudence; and how Lovelace's inability to fathom the disappearance of his tempter function after the rape, as well as his inability to respond as does Belford to Clarissa's exemplary influence, is an expression of his nature as protagonist in the Don Juan plot. Richardson conducts all three plots concurrently, Bueler demonstrates, by exploiting the psychologically and dramatistically rich resources of simultaneous dialogue and soliloquy inherent in the epistolary genre.
Author: Lois E. Bueler Publisher: Ohio State University Press ISBN: 9780814208724 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 332
Book Description
"In this study, Lois E. Bueler examines in broad literary historical terms what she calls the Tested Woman Plot, a "story-machine" that originated in the ancient Mediterranean world (as in the stories of Eve and Lucretia), flourished in English Renaissance drama (as in Much Ado about Nothing and The Changeling), and continued into the novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (as in Clarissa, Adam Bede, and The Scarlet Letter)." "Encyclopedic in scope, The Tested Woman Plot is a provocative look at a key narrative tradition that spans many genres and should appeal to all serious students of literature."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Author: Yoon Sun Lee Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press ISBN: 1512823414 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 273
Book Description
Is plot a line, an arc, or a shape? None of these. Rather than thinking of plot as a sequence of events or actions put into place solely through human agency against the backdrop of setting, this book questions why we should distinguish between plot and setting—and indeed, whether we can make such a distinction. After all, plot, Yoon Sun Lee contends, cannot be disentangled from the material setting in which it takes place. In The Natural Laws of Plot, Lee connects the history of the novel and the history of science to show how plot in the realist novel is given shape by the characteristics of the physical world—and how in turn, plot serves as the avenue through which the realist novel participates in the same lines of inquiry about the world as pursued by the natural and physical sciences. Lee argues that the novel emerges and evolves in tandem with the development of scientific practices and concepts in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe to investigate the idea of a unified and objective world. Drawing on readings from Defoe, Austen, Scott, and many others, Lee demonstrates how bodies, human and non-human, behave according to laws that are built into worlds by plot, and how they are subject to causes and consequences that can occur independently of individual action, social forces, or metaphysical destiny. This interest in representing and exploring how things happen sets the novel apart from other literary genres, and makes the history of science integral to the understanding of the history and theory of the novel, and of narrative. Plot, Lee shows us, is immersive and powerful, because it satisfies our wish to know how things happen in a coherent, objective, and possibly real world.
Author: E. Derek Taylor Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 135115074X Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 272
Book Description
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.
Author: Samuel Richardson Publisher: Penguin UK ISBN: 0141904887 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 2227
Book Description
Pressured by her unscrupulous family to marry a wealthy man she detests, the young Clarissa Harlowe is tricked into fleeing with the witty and debonair Robert Lovelace and places herself under his protection. Lovelace, however, proves himself to be an untrustworthy rake whose vague promises of marriage are accompanied by unwelcome and increasingly brutal sexual advances. And yet, Clarissa finds his charm alluring, her scrupulous sense of virtue tinged with unconfessed desire. Told through a complex series of interweaving letters, Clarissa is a richly ambiguous study of a fatally attracted couple and a work of astonishing power and immediacy. A huge success when it first appeared in 1747, and translated into French and German, it remains one of the greatest of all European novels.
Author: Terry Castle Professor of English Stanford University Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 0198024274 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 294
Book Description
A collection of the author's essays on the history and development of female identity from the 18th to the early 20th centuries. Throughout the book are woven themes which are constant in Castle's work: fantasy, hallucination, travesty, transgression and sexual ambiguity.
Author: Laura J. Rosenthal Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 0801454352 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 283
Book Description
In Infamous Commerce, Laura J. Rosenthal uses literary and historical sources to explore the meaning of prostitution from the Restoration through the eighteenth century, showing how both reformers and libertines constructed the modern meaning of sex work during this period. From Grub Street's lurid "whore biographies" to the period's most acclaimed novels, the prostitute was depicted as facing a choice between abject poverty and some form of sex work. Prostitution, in Rosenthal's view, confronted the core controversies of eighteenth-century capitalism: luxury, desire, global trade, commodification, social mobility, gender identity, imperialism, self-ownership, alienation, and even the nature of work itself. In the context of extensive research into printed accounts of both male and female prostitution—among them sermons, popular prostitute biographies, satire, pornography, brothel guides, reformist writing, and travel narratives—Rosenthal offers in-depth readings of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa and Pamela and the responses to the latter novel (including Eliza Haywood's Anti-Pamela), Bernard Mandeville's defenses of prostitution, Daniel Defoe's Roxana, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, and travel journals about the voyages of Captain Cook to the South Seas. Throughout, Rosenthal considers representations of the prostitute's own sexuality (desire, revulsion, etc.) to be key parts of the changing meaning of "the oldest profession."
Author: Samuel Richardson Publisher: Broadview Press ISBN: 1551114755 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 811
Book Description
This classic novel tells the story, in letters, of the beautiful and virtuous Clarissa Harlowe’s pursuit by the brilliant, unscrupulous rake Robert Lovelace. The epistolary structure allows Richardson to create layered and fully realized characters, as well as an intriguing uncertainty about the reliability of the various “narrators.” Clarissa emerges as a heroine at once rational and passionate, self-sacrificing and defiant, and her story has gripped readers since the novel’s first publication in 1747–48. This new abridgment is designed to retain the novel’s rich characterizations and relationships, and reproduces individual letters in their entirety whenever possible. This Broadview Edition provides a uniquely accessible entry point for readers, while retaining much of the powerful reading experience of the complete novel.
Author: Thomas O. Beebee Publisher: Penn State Press ISBN: 0271039558 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 245
Book Description
"Clarissa" on the Continent defines and explores two strategies of literary translation—creative vs. preservative and strong vs. weak—as they transform one of the most influential English novels. Thomas Beebee compares the two opposing strategies as they influence the French translation of Clarissa by the novelist Antione François de Prévost and the German translation by the Göttingen Orientalist Johann David Michaelis, and in doing so he demonstrates that each translator found authority for his procedure within the text itself. Each translation is also examined in light of Richardson's other writings and placed in its literary and cultural context. This study uses translations in order to interpret Clarissa, to show how the basis for the novel's reception on the Continent was laid, and to explore the differences and interactions among three literary and cultural systems of the eighteenth century. The close examination of these two important translations enable the formulation of not only a theory of creative vs. preservative translation but also the interconnections between literary theory and translation theory. Beebee also looks at later translations of Clarissa as products of literary and historical change and at Prévostian strategies of the novel.
Author: Lois E. Bueler
Author: Lois E. Bueler
Author: Yoon Sun Lee
Author: E. Derek Taylor
Author: Samuel Richardson
Author: Terry Castle Professor of English Stanford University
Author: Laura J. Rosenthal
Author: Samuel Richardson
Author: Harold Bloom
Author: Thomas O. Beebee