notes: Samuel Richardson, Clarissa

[heresluck]

After I mentioned my notes on Clarissa in the closing tag to a completely unrelated post, coffee_and_ink, batwrangler, and redredshoes all said they wanted to see the notes.

Never let it be said that I don't post things I promise to post; it just takes me a while. Sometimes an extremely long while.

Let's move on, shall we?

Comments

[heresluck]

She'd expected the usual reform plot, you see. It was a glimpse of how the novel must have read to contemporaries...

Yeah, exactly. It sets you right up for that, and then... everything goes kablooey.

...the letters, though endless and overinvolved, were much more effective at creating the kind of psychological interiority that defines the novel from the 19th c. onwards...

Yes; although I'd actually quibble with the notion that the novel as a genre is defined by psychological interiority. It's certainly true that *lots* of novels aim in that direction, but not all.

I'm not a big fan of reading 18th c. novels through the lens of the 19th c. -- a long-standing trend in novel studies, and one that inevitably hands the 18th c. the short end of the stick -- so I'm actually more interested in the epistolary form as a way of negotiating 18th c. concerns about fiction and virtue: How can one tell the truth through fiction? Under what circumstances can a pack of lies have moral, spiritual, or didactic value? The way in which the novel highlights the possibility of duplicitous writing is just fascinating from this point of view.