Richardson's 'Clarissa' and the Eighteenth-Century Reader (Cambridge Studies in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Thought, Series Number 13)

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. "Clarissa is one of the undisputed masterpieces of eighteenth-century literature and of the English novel. Recently it has also become central to poststructuralist, psychoanalytic and feminist debate. This book, whilst benefiting from recent theoretical studies, restores Clarissa to its largely neglected eighteenth-century context. Reading the novel against a variety of literary, historical and cultural backgrounds, it pays particular attention to the problematic relationship between Richardson's didactic intentions, the complexity of the text itself and the diverse reading experiences of its first audience."--Jacket The classic period of the epistolary novel was also, in the writings of Pope, Horace Walpole, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and others, the heyday of the familiar letter.