The Rise of the Novel
Charles Knight

The best collected edition of the novels may still be the "Shakespeare Head Edition" (Oxford: Blackwell, 1929-31), which retains the original spelling and punctuation; but individual novels have become accessible in recent years. The third edition of Clarissa is somewhat inaccurately available in the Everyman's Library Edition (4 vols.); the first edition, as you know, has been published by Penguin. A more accurate facsimile of the third edition of Clarissa (8 vols.) has recent been issued, at great expense, by AMS press, under the editorship of a consortium of scholars who are preparing another eight volumes of material about the novel by Richardson and various eighteenth-century readers. Jocelyn Harris has edited Sir Charles Grandison for the Oxford English Novels (now out of print). Two versions of Pamela have been well edited: the first edition (1740, dated 1741) by T.C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel (Riverside, 1971); Richardson's final revision (published 1801) by Peter Sabor (Penguin, 1980). Richardson's instructive continuation of Pamela is volume 2 of the Everyman's edition (but in an inaccurate nineteenth-century text). John Carroll has edited a selection of Richardson's letters (Oxford, 1964).

2. Bibliography.

Dussinger, John. "Selected Bibliography: Samuel Richardson (1689-1761.) On-line bibliography: http://www.c18.rutgers.edu/biblio/richardson.html [Lightly annotated and oddly organized by topic and date, but contains a useful range of material.]

Hannaford, Richard Gordon. Samuel Richardson: An Annotated Bibliography of Critical Studies. New York: Garland, 1980.

Sale, William Merrett. Samuel Richardson: A Bibliographical Record of his Literary Career with Historical Notes. New Haven: Yale University Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1936.

Smith, Sarah W.R. Samuel Richardson: A Reference Guide. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1984.

Eaves, T.C. Duncan and Ben D. Kimpel. Samuel Richardson: A Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971. [More than you will ever want to know about Richardson, but thoroughly researched and particularly informative on the composition of the novels; it includes a census of the correspondence.]

McKillop, A.D. Samuel Richardson: Printer and Novelist. 1936; rpt. Hamden, CT: Shoestring Press, 1960. [A good biography, but largely superseded by Eaves and Kimpel; still useful on Richardson as a printer.]

Braudy, Leo. "Penetration and Impenetrability in Clarissa." In New Approaches to Eighteenth-Century Literature. Edited by Phillip Harth. Columbia University Press, 1974. Pp. 177-206. [The sexual, psychological, social, and hermeneutic puns of penetrability; lively but questionable.]

Brissendon, R.F. Samuel Richardson. London: Longmans, Green for the British Council, 1958. [Very short and somewhat out-of-date, but still an excellent introduction to Richardson.]

Brophy, Elizabeth B. Samuel Richardson: The Triumph of Craft. University of Tennessee Press, 1974. [As the title suggests, the study concentrates on the elements of conscious artistry.]

Carroll, John, ed. Samuel Richardson: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969. [See particularly the essays by Farrell (on style) and Hilles (on structure).]

Castle, Terry. Clarissa's Ciphers: Meaning and Disruption in Richardson's "Clarissa." Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982. [The two characters interpret each other directly and through letters which readers in turn interpret, a "multiplicity of exegetes struggling to articulate different 'constructions of the world,'" making Clarissa "an exemplary victim of hermeneutic violence."]

Denton, Ramona. "Anna Howe and Richardson's Ambivalent Artistry in Clarissa." Philological Quarterly 58 (1979), 53-62. [A thorough analysis of Anna's "technical and thematic" functions.]

Doederlein, Sue Warrick.  "Clarissa in the Hands of the Critics."  Eighteenth-Century Studies 16.4 (Summer 1983): 401-14.  [A bold and witty argument (distorted but interesting) that critics of Clarissa, up to but not including Castle, take a Lovelacean view of the rape, or at least a view that reflects a masculine ideology.  Calls for a new reading that examines "those ambiguities that now seem certainties."

Doody, Margaret Anne. A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels of Samuel Richardson. London: Oxford University Press, 1974. [A relatively traditional study but thorough and sensible, treating sources, analogues, and background; one of the two best general books on Richardson.]

---, and Peter Sabor.  Samuel Richardson: Tercentenary Essays.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.  [Includes four essays on Clarissa.  John Dussinger unconvincingly draws conclusions about Clarissa's insincerity from the instability of language itself; Edward Copeland shows Richardson's use of the topography of London; James Grant Turner's important essay on libertinism explores its paradoxes and connects them to a libertine tradition.  Tom Keymer comments on a separate volume of Clarissa's meditations.]

Eagleton, Terry. The Rape of Clarissa. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. [A post-structuralist, feminist-psychological, Marxist reading of the novel; short (101 pp.), contentious, and stimulating.]

Flynn, Carol Houlihan. Samuel Richardson: A Man of Letters. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). [Organized topically (chapters on sentimentalized women, fallen women, fairy tales, rakes), it reads the novels in the contexts of historical issues and of the creative process by which Richardson writes out his identity.]

Gillis, Christina Marsden. The Paradox of Privacy: Epistolary Form in Clarissa. Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1983. [A sensitive analysis of public and private spaces, of epistolary form, of the solitary individual and the social actor.]

Goldberg, Rita. Sex and Enlightenment: Women in Richardson and Diderot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. [More on Richardson than on Diderot (primarily La Religieuse), it analyzes language and cultural stereotypes to reveal Clarissa's entrapment by fictional and historical forces.]

Gordon, Scott Paul.  "Disinterested Selves:  Clarissa and the Tactics of Sentiment."  ELH 64.2 (Summer 1997): 473-502.  [Such critics as Warner, Castle, and Keymer misread Clarissa in much the same way that the Harlowes misread Clarissa: by seeing her discourse as manipulated, they make it impossible for her to appear credible or sincere.  Richardson combats such misreading by making readers care about her.]

Harris, Jocelyn.  Samuel Richardson.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.  [Sees Clarissa as Richardson's successful effort to rewrite Pamela, correcting its faults.  Provides useful but fairly elementary summaries of the novels, with often insightful commentaries but without moving to larger generalizations.]

Hudson, Nicholas.  "Arts of Seduction and the Rhetoric of Clarissa."  Modern Language Quarterly 51.1 (March 1990): 25-43.  [Compares Lovelace's seductive arts to those by which Richardson attracts the reader--in both cases by "the art of making a focused act of rhetoric appear dialogic."]

Kearney, A.M. Samuel Richardson: Clarissa. London: E. Arnold, 1975. [Brief (72 pp.) introduction and discussion of major issues.]

Keymer, Tom. Richardson's Clarissa and the Eighteenth-Century Reader. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. [Readership is an epistolary form whose texts do not encompass reality; the problems created for the eighteenth-century reader, as revealed by documented responses and as seen in relation to major issues: parent-child relations, criminality and transgression, and narrative, religious, and legal justice. The best recent study of Clarissa.]

Kinkead-Weekes, Mark. Samuel Richardson: Dramatic Novelist. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973. [The other of the two best general books; a close, new-critical reading of Richardson's three novels.]

Maddox, James H., Jr. "Lovelace and the World of Ressentiment in Clarissa. Texas Studies in Literature and Language 24 (1982), 271-92. [Sees the struggles for power as deriving from the inner fears of humiliation.]

Michie, Alan.  Richardson and Fielding: The Dynamics of a Critical Rivalry.  Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1999. [Not a study of their mutual influence and not a study of their novels, but a history of their critical reception, especially relative to one another, from 1741 to 1959.]

Park, William. "Clarissa as Tragedy." Studies in English Literature 16 (1976), 461-71. [Richardson's use of tragic conventions provides a better basis for reading the novel than psychological and sociological approaches do.]

Rivero, Albert J, ed..  New Essays on Samuel Richardson.  New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996.  [Includes six essays on Clarissa by major critics: Suarez on Clarissa as rebellious daughter; Stevenson on the rejection of the body by both Clarissa and Lovelace; Harris on Richardson's use of pornography; Weinbrot on satire in the letters of Rev. Brand (in the 3rd edition); Keymer on a contemporary reading of the fire scene; Bartolomeo on Clarissa and The Female Quixote.]

Thompson, Peggy.  "Abuse and Atonement: The Passion of Clarissa Harlowe."  Eighteenth-Cetury Fiction 11.3 (April 1999):255-70.  [Clarissa's suffering resembles Christ's and is similarly subject to various interpretations, including classic theories of atonement that Richardson might have known.  Clarissa is "a passive woman who derives meaning and importance only from her victimization by men."]

Traugott, John. Clarissa's Richardson: An Essay to Find the Reader." In English Literature in the Age of Disguise. Edited by Maximillian Novak. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977. Pp. 157-208. [Distinguishes Richardson the creative genius from Richardson the chubby printer by looking at Clarissa as a personal and generic battle between comedy and realism. Seen in this way, the characters transcend moral narrowness to enact an enduring paradox.]

Van Marter, Shirley. "Richardson's Revisions of Clarissa in the Third and Fourth Editions." Studies in Bibliography 28 (1975): 119-52. [Argues that the changes Richardson made to the 3rd edition may represent conscious improvements; the 3rd edition may be a more appropriate copy text than the 1st.]

Warner, William Beatty. Reading Clarissa: The Struggles of Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. [The interpretive struggles of the characters, of the novel's initial readers, of us; a study "informed and molested by the theoretical questions addressed in the texts of Nietzsche, Derrida, Barthes, and others."]

Wilt, Judith. "He Could Go No Further: A Modest Proposal about Lovelace and Clarissa." PMLA 92 (1977), 19-32. [Wilt's modest proposal is that Lovelace was impotent and Mrs. Sinclair the rapist--an eccentric view that she pursues with brilliant (if exasperating) thoroughness.]

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