Samuel Richardson

This book analyzes the ways in which female virtue was tied to a new concept of authenticity in 18th-century sentimental fiction, producing a redefinition of gender relations on the one hand & a re-examination of the value & place of fictional narrative on the other. As the old values on the aristocracy were being overturned & it was no longer possible simply to equate personal worth with rank or title, a new narrative protagonist was born - someone who was authentic, virtuous, & usually female. New questions arose at the same time: What kind of language could represent this authentic self? How far should the virtuous subject be tested, & what is the role of the reader in the process? With in-depth analysis of four important 18th-century epistolary novels - Pamela, Clarissa, La Nouvelle Heloise, & Les Liaisons Dangereuses - the author shows that the female protagonist in these works is forced to protect her body & her writing from violation. She argues that a disturbing equation emerges between revealing the female body & revealing a female sensibility &, therefore, between pleasure - both narrative & visual - & virtue. Concluding with Les Liaisons Dangereuses & the end of the sentimental narrative tradition, the author questions even the possibility of sustaining authentic language. In these four texts, she says, writing becomes an ideological as well as literary tool for the establishment of new cultural values.

This book investigates the critical importance of women to the eighteenth-century debate on property as conducted in the fiction of the period. April London argues that contemporary novels offered several, often conflicting, interpretations of the relation of women to property, ranging from straightforward assertions of equivalence between women and things to subtle explorations of the forms of possession open to those denied a full civic identity. Her wide-ranging study discusses the work of a variety of writers, from Samuel Richardson and Henry Mackenzie to Clara Reeve and Jane West.

Letters - a most traditional and old-fashioned form of discourse - continue to offer special opportunities for writers and readers in the postmodern era. Bower explores the way letters shape the act of writing and writing as act. Epistolary Responses uses a variety of theoretical approaches (chiefly feminist and reader response) to analyze seven novels, all featuring women letter writers: Ana Castillo's The Mixquiahuala Letters, Upton Sinclair's Another Pamela, John Updike's S., Jean Webster's Daddy-Long-Legs, Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Lee Smith's Fair and Tender Ladies, and John Barth's LETTERS (in which six men also write letters, but the central and most original epistolarian is female). Punctuated with various letters - from novel authors and critics - Epistolary Responses enacts some of the give and take of the subject matter and provides some sense of the collective or composite textuality.

What do Pamela, Shamela, and Evelina have in common? Who is Coningsby? Where is The Moonstone? When does one need A Room of One's Own? Why is it that Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit? And just how good is the British novel? These are just a few of the questions answered in The Columbia History of the British Novel. John Richetti's comprehensive history takes us from the birth of the novel in the eighteenth century through its social and culture-conscious growing pains in the nineteenth century to its angst-ridden maturity in the twentieth century. Concise, cohesive, and complementary to any collection of must-read classics, The Columbia History of the British Novel challenges and enlightens us by examining canonical writers as well as women and postcolonial novelists. Discover the origins of the novel in the "scandalous" books of Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, and Delarivier Manley and follow its development through Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Laurence Sterne against the backdrop of the novel's meteoric rise in the 1700s. Follow Frances Burney and the rise of the woman novelist, and the gothic novel as invented by Horace Walpole and perfected by Mary Shelley and Matthew Lewis. Remember remarkable reunions in Jane Austen; the bond between chivalry, Waverley, and Sir Walter Scott; the Brontes, Amelia Opie, Maria Edgeworth, and the tradition of Romantic women's fiction; Charles Dickens and the professionalization of literature; George Eliot and the novel of ideas; and Wilkie Collins and the sensation mania of the 1860s. Continue through the nineteenth century with the "Condition of England" novels of Benjamin Disraeli and Elizabeth Gaskell, Hardy's tales of class and sexualdifference, and Anglo-Indian perspectives on the empire from Rudyard Kipling and Philip Meadows Taylor. Enter the twentieth century and examine the modern novel with Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. Then trace the anti-