No detailed description available for "Samuel Richardson's theory of fiction".

In developing a new gender theory for analyzing Samuel Richardson's three major novels - Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison - the author argues that these novels of sexual threat expose, sometimes unwillingly, the extraordinary labor required to construct and maintain the eighteenth-century ideology of gender, that apparently natural dream of perfect symmetry between the sexes. The instability of that model is revealed notably in Richardson's fascination with cross-gender identification and other instances of transgressive desires. The author demonstrates that these violations of the supposedly unbreachable barriers between masculinity and femininity produce what is most moving and imaginative in Richardson's fiction and create an equally powerful repression in the form of punishment of transgressive characters and desires. She also illustrates, through a reading of recurrent fantasies about the composition of bodies - especially women's bodies - the complex interaction between those fantasies and the construction of masculinity and femininity. The genesis of Richardson's own writing is located in a dynamic, reciprocal idea of gender that allows him to see femininity from the inside while retaining the privileges of the masculine viewpoint; the relation between this origin and the novels themselves forms the basis for the discussions of the novels. Each of the three chapters in the book seeks to investigate particular turn of gender construction and a particular mode of the reiterative story of sexual differences. The first chapter, on Pamela, calls on eighteenth-century discourse about opposing ideologies of gender and sexuality to elucidate Richardson's project. The next chapter, on Clarissa, shifts to a more intricate analysis of fantasies about sex and gender, in particular the double reading of masculinity and femininity in the form of of masculinity reading itself through the feminine. The final chapter, on The History of Sir Charles Grandison, examines Richardson's attempt to solidify masculinity in the person of the "good man."

Samuel Richardson emerges in Fysh's analysis as a man on the cusp of change - in the organization of the printing industry and of labor generally, and in the nature of the literary text - and his work as a printer as well as his literary works (the two being fundamentally inseparable) come to be seen as instrumental in and representative of these changes.

Samuel Richardson and the theory of tragedy is a bold new interpretation of one of the greatest European novels, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa. It argues that this text needs to be rethought as a dangerous exploration of the ethics of tragedy, on the scale of the great arguments of post-Romantic tragic theory, from Hölderlin to Nietzsche, to Benjamin, Lacan and beyond. Taking the reader through the novel from beginning to end, it also acts as a guidebook for newcomers to Richardson's notoriously massive text, and situates it alongside Richardson's other works and the epistolary novel form in general. Filled with innovative close readings that will provoke scholars, students and general readers of the novel alike, it will also serve as a jumping off point for anyone interested in the way the theory of tragedy continues to be the privileged meeting point between literature and philosophy.

Samuel Richardson and the theory of tragedy is a bold new interpretation of one of the greatest European novels, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa. It argues that this text needs to be rethought as a dangerous exploration of the ethics of tragedy, on the scale of the great arguments of post-Romantic tragic theory, from Hölderlin to Nietzsche, to Benjamin, Lacan and beyond. Taking the reader through the novel from beginning to end, it also acts as a guidebook for newcomers to Richardson's notoriously massive text, and situates it alongside Richardson's other works and the epistolary novel form in general. Filled with innovative close readings that will provoke scholars, students and general readers of the novel alike, it will also serve as a jumping off point for anyone interested in the way the theory of tragedy continues to be the privileged meeting point between literature and philosophy.

Richardson's novels reveal the conflict of human passion in all its aspects - love, lust, and suffering. This conflict is considered and critically analysed in fourteen essays, all originally published in Eighteenth-Century Fiction.