Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Richardson's 'Clarissa' and the Eighteenth-Century Reader

Richardson's 'Clarissa' and the Eighteenth-Century Reader

Keymer, Tom
Erskine-Hill, Howard
Tom, Keymer

Paperback

Series: Cambridge Studies in Eighteenth-Century English Literature a, Book 13

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 0521604400
ISBN13: 9780521604406
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: Jun 24 2004
Pages: 296
Weight: 0.96
Height: 0.67 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
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.

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