Whilst drawing to some extent on recent theoretical studies, this book restores Clarissa to its largely neglected eighteenth-century context.

Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady is an epistolary novel by Samuel Richardson, published in 1748. It tells the tragic story of a heroine pressured by her unscrupulous family to marry a wealthy man she detests. The young Clarissa is tricked into fleeing with the debonair Robert Lovelace and places herself under his protection. Lovelace, however, proves 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. These two volumes bring together examples of the extensive and impressively varied reaction to the novel from the moment of its publication to the first edition of Richardson’s correspondence. Drawn from sources in Britain, the Continent, and North America, the material ranges from casual readers' responses to extended critical essays in the major publications of the day; from verse elegies to poetic appreciations; from an English shopkeeper's diary to a distraught young German woman's plea for pastoral advice; from fictionalized conduct books to novels about the London sex trade; from debates among the most celebrated intellectuals of the century to dramatic adaptations written in four languages.

The handbook offers a comprehensive introduction to the British novel in the long eighteenth century, when this genre emerged to develop into the period’s most versatile and popular literary form. Part I features six systematic chapters that discuss literary, intellectual, socio-economic, and political contexts, providing innovative approaches to issues such as sense and sentiment, gender considerations, formal characteristics, economic history, enlightened and radical concepts of citizenship and human rights, ecological ramifications, and Britain’s growing global involvement. Part II presents twenty-five analytical chapters that attend to individual novels, some canonical and others recently recovered. These analyses engage the debates outlined in the systematic chapters, undertaking in-depth readings that both contextualize the works and draw on relevant criticism, literary theory, and cultural perspectives. The handbook’s breadth and depth, clear presentation, and lucid language make it attractive and accessible to scholar and student alike.

Provides twenty-first century readers with a new, comprehensive and suggestive account of the sentimental novel in the eighteenth century.

This book analyzes why the most influential novelists of the long eighteenth century centered their narratives on the theory and practice of gift exchange. Throughout this period, fundamental shifts in economic theories regarding the sources of individual and national wealth along with transformations in the practices of personal and institutional charity profoundly altered cultural understandings of the gift's rationale, purpose, and function. Drawing on materials such as sermons, conduct books, works of political philosophy, and tracts on social reform, Zionkowski challenges the idea that capitalist discourse was the dominant influence on the development of prose fiction. Instead, by shifting attention to the gift system as it was imagined and enacted in the formative years of the novel, the volume offers an innovative understanding of how the economy of obligation shaped writers' portrayals of class and gender identity, property, and community. Through theoretically-informed readings of Richardson's Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison, Burney's Cecilia and The Wanderer, and Austen's Mansfield Park and Emma, the book foregrounds the issues of donation, reciprocity, indebtedness, and gratitude as it investigates the conflicts between the market and moral economies and analyzes women's position at the center of these conflicts. As this study reveals, the exchanges that eighteenth-century fiction prescribed for women confirm the continuing power and importance of gift transactions in the midst of an increasingly commercial culture. The volume will be essential reading for scholars of the eighteenth-century novel, economic literary criticism, women and gender studies, and book history.

In the past twenty years our understanding of the novel's emergence in eighteenth-century Britain has drastically changed. Drawing on new research in social and political history, the twelve contributors to this Companion challenge and refine the traditional view of the novel's origins and purposes. In various ways each seeks to show that the novel is not defined primarily by its realism of representation, but by the new ideological and cultural functions it serves in the emerging modern world of print culture. Sentimental and Gothic fiction and fiction by women are discussed, alongside detailed readings of work by Defoe, Swift, Richardson, Henry Fielding, Sterne, Smollett, and Burney. This multifaceted picture of the novel in its formative decades provides a comprehensive and indispensable guide for students of the eighteenth-century British novel, and its place within the culture of its time.

This book explores the reciprocal influence of friendship ideals and narrative forms in eighteenth-century British fiction. It examines how various novelists, from Samuel Richardson to Mary Shelley, drew upon classical and early modern conceptions of true amity as a model of collaborative pedagogy. Analyzing authors, their professional circumstances, and their audiences, the study shows how the rhetoric of friendship became a means of paying deference to the increasing power of readerships, while it also served as a semi-covert means to persuade resistant readers and confront aesthetic and moral debates head on. The study contributes to an understanding of gender roles in the early history of the novel by disclosing the constant interplay between male and female models of amity. It demonstrates that this gendered dialogue shaped the way novelists imagined character interiority, reconciled with the commercial aspects of writing, and engaged mixed-sex audiences.