The preoccupations of eighteenth-century novelist Samuel Richardson—the inequities of gender and sexuality; race and white femininity; masculinity, sadism, and control; religion and selfhood; authorship and artistic form—continue to resonate with contemporary readers. This fresh collection reconsiders his oeuvre, expanding and significantly updating critical debate on its meaning and importance. In these lively and engaging essays, contributors examine historically overlooked works, provide new readings of his best-known novels Pamela and Clarissa, and stake a serious claim for the importance of his final novel, Sir Charles Grandison. Diverse, inventive, and provocative, these essays demonstrate the complexity, relevance, and surprising legacies of Richardson’s novels and characters—finding traces in post-conceptual poetry, detective fiction, and in the fantasies of historical romance. Revisiting Richardson reflects on a decade of scholarship while delivering innovative perspectives on an author whose work continues to be indispensable for understanding the history of the novel.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed by Rutgers University Press.
Introduction
Rebecca Anne Barr and Bonnie Latimer
1 Citizens of the Future: The Apprentice’s Vade Mecum in Context
Bonnie Latimer
2 Queer Time in Pamela
Declan Kavanagh
3 “Happy, happy, happy, thrice happy Pamela”?: Gendered Happiness and the Happiness Gap in Pamela and Pamela II
Heather Ann Ladd
4 Conceptual Richardson
Amelia Dale
5 Clarissa with Sade: Persecution and Plot after Richardson
Samuel Rowe
6 Clarissa and White Supremacy: Race, Gender and Erasure
Kerry Sinanan
7 Misogyny and the Male Virgin in Sir Charles Grandison
Rebecca Anne Barr
8 Solving for Y: Fictive Kinship and Character in The History of Sir Charles Grandison
Sarah Berkowitz
9 “One in a Hundred”: Extending the Influence of Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison
E. Derek Taylor
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
About the Contributors
Index
Introduction 1
Rebecca Anne Barr and Bonnie Latimer
1 Citizens of the Future:
The Apprentice’s Vade
Mecum in Context 16
Bonnie Latimer
2 Queer Time in Pamela 32
Declan Kavanagh
3 “Happy, Happy, Happy, Thrice Happy Pamela”?
Gendered Happiness and the Happiness Gap
in Pamela and Pamela II 48
Heather Ladd
4 Conceptual Richardson 67
Amelia Dale
5 Clarissa
with Sade: Persecution and Plot
after
Richardson 85
Samuel Rowe
6 Clarissa
and White Supremacy: Race, Gender,
and Erasure 102
Kerry Sinanan
7 Misogyny and the Male Virgin in
Sir Charles Grandison 122
Rebecca Anne Barr
8 Solving for Y: Fictive Kinship and Character
in The History of Sir Charles Grandison 139
Sarah Berkowitz
569-
9 “One in a Hundred”: Extending the Influence of
Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison 153
E. Derek Taylor
Acknowledgments
167
Bibliography 169
Notes on Contributors 183
Index 000
REBECCA ANNE BARR is an associate professor in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge in the UK. She has published widely on gender, sexual violence, and the novel, and is coeditor of Bellies, Bowels, and Entrails in the Eighteenth Century and Ireland and Masculinities in History.
BONNIE LATIMER is a professor of Restoration and eighteenth-century literature at the University of Southampton in the UK, where she is also the associate dean for education in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. She has published on Richardson and various other eighteenth-century topics.
