I. Servants: Servants are prominent in the literature of duties or conduct and in Richardson’s fiction. What social, ideological, and fictional functions do servants serve. What problems do servants seem to present to or resolve for the culture “above” them? What kinds of power do they have? Does casuistry seem to serve them?
Some useful material follows, but talk to me first. Your principal aim will not be to become an expert on servants.
Bruce Robbins, The Servant’s Hand. (Victorian fiction, but more wide-ranging).
Bridgett Hill, Servants: English Domestics in the Eighteenth Century (1996).
J. Jean Hecht, The Domestic Servant Class in England, 1956.
Robert Folkenflik, "Pamela: Domestic Servitude, Marriage, and the Novel." Eighteenth Century Fiction. Apr 1993, 5:3, 253-68.
Early Modern Bibliography: Servants & Apprentices: http://www.earlymodernweb.org.uk/embiblios/emservantbib.htmII. Ungoverned relationships: Siblings. Friendships between equals. How do they disturb the order outlined in governed relations? Where does their power lie? A new book, Lynn Shepherd's Clarissa's Painter: Portraiture, Illustration, and Representation in the Novels of Samuel Richardson (2009) might be useful here. Our thinking in class about the many paths of sexual energies in the novel might coincide with this topic. There are many directions here and, correspondingly, many possible critical materials.
III. I'm working out a topic on the innateness implied through casuistry's understanding of conscience vs the new model of the mind as analyzed by John Locke in his Essay on Human Understanding. More later.
IV. Casuistry and epistolarity: A number of writers who ask 'where casuistry went' when it disappeared from the world suggest that it went to the novel, in particlar to the epistolary novel. What does this claim mean? Is epistolarity inherently linked to the methods or procedures of the casuists? Is problem-solving necessarily at the heart of the epistolary novel? Or is it that epistolarity lends itself to a telling of one's own story?
Start from what you know--examples of casuistry, critical material on casuistry, Richardson's novels. There is a lot of critical material on 18th. c. epistolarity. One of the early important books, Janet Gurkin Altman's Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form is available from OSU Press in pdf under an Open Access Initiative. Please click on the title for that access. We are reading Tom Keymer's chapter on Richardson and epistolarity for class. A somewhat earlier book, Carol Houlihan Flynn's Samuel Richardson: A Man of Letters (Princeton, 1982), especially in ch. 6 & 7 explores the idea of self-making in letters. An important book is Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1996). Another book is Clare Brant's Eighteeth Century Letters and British Culture (2006) and a recent article is Ann Louise Kibbie's The Estate, the Corpse, and the Letter: Posthumous Possession in "Clarissa," ELH, Vol. 74, No. 1 (Spring, 2007), pp. 117-143. A very recent book on the culture of writing in social ranks below those usually studied is Susan Whyman's The Pen and the People (2009).
V. Casuistry and Richardson’s new method of “writing to the moment”: Richardson claimed, with some pride, that his new method, was new. The letters are written "while the hearts of the writers must be supposed to be wholly engaged in their subjects: the events at the time generally dubious--so that they abound not only with critical situations, but with what may be called instantaneous descriptions and reflections" (Preface). Does such a stylistic method coincide with or run counter to the method of casuistry? What happens to casuistry under the pressure of the moment? Is the casuistical burden perhaps shifted to the reader?
VI. The Rape is a problem of central and varying interest. It can be combined with some of the topics above. Some works of interest areYou may want to do a little reading on Richardson's "writing to the moment," but first, think this question out from your reading of casuistry cases and Richardson's novels. It's possible that this topic is more suited to a pro-seminar paper than a seminar paper.
- Legal materials
1. J.M. Beattie's Crime and the Courts in England, 1660-1800. Princeton, 1986. References to rape fall under "criminal offenses against the person" and are on pp. 6-7, 74-77, & 124-132.
2. A famous 18th c writer: William Blackstone wrote commentaries (4 vols) on the laws of England. You can find his work online at various sites. He deals with the history of the laws of rape in Book IV, Public Wrongs, Ch. 15, "Of Offences against the Persons of Individuals." Section III: http://www.lonang.com/exlibris/blackstone/bla-415.htm (scroll down the page to section III).
3. Also an 18th. c. writer: Robert Chambers, A Course of Lectures on the English Law, 1767-1773, ed. Thomas Curley, 2 vols. Madison, Wisconsin, 1986. The discussioin of rape is I, 405-7.
Some articles and books:Judith Wilt, He Could Go No Farther: A Modest Proposal about Lovelace and Clarissa, PMLA, Vol. 92, No. 1 (Jan., 1977), pp. 19-32.
William Warner, Proposal and Habitation: The Temporality and Authority of Interpretation in and about a Scene of Richardson's Clarissa boundary 2, Vol. 7, No. 2, Revisions of the Anglo-American Tradition: Part 1 (Winter, 1979), pp. 169-200.
William Warner, Reading Clarissa: The struggles of interpretation. New Haven: Yale, 1079.
Ian Donaldson, The Rape of Lucretia: A Myth and its Transformations . Oxford: Clarendon, 1982.
Paul Gabriel Bouce, ed. Sexuality in eighteenth-century Novels. Manchester, 1982.
Terry Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality, and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson. Minnesota, 1982.
Terry Castle, Clarissa's Ciphers: Meaning & Disruption in Richardson's "Clarissa." 1982.
Sylvana Tomaselli & Roy Porter (eds), Rape. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. Has several useful articles, including Jennifer Temkin, Women, Rape and Law Reform, and Roy Porter, Rape: Does it Have a Historical Meaning?
Frances Ferguson, "Rape and the Rise of the Novel," Representations 20 (1987) 88-112. This article is part of a special issue called Misogyny, Misandry, and Misanthropy.
Joy Kyunghae Lee, "The Commodification of Virtue: Chastity and the Virginal Body in Richardson's Clarissa," The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 36 (Spring 1995): 38-54.
Mary Patricia Martin, Reading Reform in Richardson's Clarissa, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 37, No. 3, Restoration and Eighteenth Century (Summer, 1997), pp. 595-614.
Sandra Macpherson, Lovelace, Ltd.ELH, Vol. 65, No. 1 (Spring, 1998), pp. 99-121
Antony E. Simpson, Popular Perceptions of Rape as a Capital Crime in Eighteenth-Century England: The Press and the Trial of Francis Charteris in the Old Bailey, February 1730 Law and History Review, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring, 2004), pp. 27-70
Katherine Binhammer, "Knowing Love: The Epistemology of Clarissa," ELH, Volume 74, Number 4, Winter 2007, pp. 859-879.
For a bibliography of representations of rape in popular culture: http://faculty.law.lsu.edu/ccorcos/lawhum/RAPEBIBLIOGRAPHY.htm
This illustration is a John Leech Sketch from Punch called "Symptoms of Wet Weather," dated 1846, just about a century after the first publication of Clarissa. This image comes from the John Leech Sketch archives from Punch. The same image is available for sale from a modern postcard vendor.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ITEMS OF SPECIAL INTEREST--in addition to those listed above for paper topics (or among "useful materials")--are
- Samuel Richardson, Tercentenary Essays, ed., Margaret Anne Doody and Peter Sabor. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989.
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Contents 1.Teaching Pamela /Florian Stuber 2. Pamela: rethinking arcadia /Gillian Beer 3. Truth and storytelling in Clarissa /John Dussinger 4. Remapping London: Clarissa and the woman in the window /Edward Copeland 5. Lovelace and the paradoxes of libertinism /James Grantham Turner 6. Richardson's Meditations: Clarissa's Clarissa Tom Keymer 7. Identity and character in Sir Charles Grandison /Margaret Anne Doody 8. The pains of compliance in Sir Charles Grandison /Carol Houlihan Flynn 9. Richardson's 'Speaking Pictures' /Janet E. Aikens 10. Unravelling the 'Cord which ties good men to good men': male friendship in Richardson's novels /David Robinson 11. Richardson: original or learned genius? /Jocelyn Harris 12. 'A Young, a Richardson, or a Johnson': lines of cultural force in the age of Richardson /Pat Rogers 13. 'A novel in a series of letters by a lady': Richardson and some Richardsonian novels /Isobel Grundy 14. Publishing Richardson's correspondence: the 'necessary office of selection' /Peter Sabor 15. The rise of Richardson criticism /Siobhan Kilfeather
- New essays on Samuel Richardson, ed. Albert J. Rivero. New York : St. Martin’s Press, 1996.
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Contents 1. "Such Extraordinary Tokens": Samuel Richardson’s Correspondence with Johannes Stinstra / Peter Sabor -- 2. Richardson the Advisor / Kevin L. Cope -- 3. Richardson’s Girls: The Daughters of Patriarchy in Pamela, Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison / Jerry C. Beasley -- 4. Pamela II: "Written in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes" / Florian Stuber -- 5. Asserting the Negative: "Child" Clarissa and the Problem of the "Determined Girl" / Michael F. Suarez -- 6. "Alien Spirits": The Unity of Lovelace and Clarissa / John Allen Stevenson -- 7. Grotesque, Classical and Pornographic Bodies in Clarissa / Jocelyn Harris -- 8. Clarissa, Elias Brand and Death by Parentheses / Howard D. Weinbrot -- 9. Jane Collier, Reader of Richardson, and the Fire Scene in Clarissa / Tom Keymer -- 10. Female Quixotism v. "Feminine" Tragedy: Lennox’s Comic Revision of Clarissa / Joseph F. Bartolomeo -- 11. Anna Meades, Samuel Richardson and Thomas Hull: The Making of The History of Sir William Harrington / John A. Dussinger. 12. Sir Charles Grandison and the Human Prospect / Lois A. Chaber -- 13. Representing Clementina: "Unnatural" Romance and the Ending of Sir Charles Grandison / Albert J. Rivero. - Clarissa and her readers: new essays for the Clarissa Project, ed. and introd . Carol Houlihan Flynn and Edward Copeland. New York: AMS Press, 1999.
Contents Richardson and his readers / Carol Houlihan Flynn -- Reclassifying Clarissa / Nancy Armstrong -- Clarissa’s cruelty / Jayne Elizabeth Lewis -- Clarissa and early female fiction / Jerry C. Beasley -- Lady Bradshaigh reads and writes Clarissa / Janice Broder -- Clarissa’s daughters / Ruth Perry -- Belforded over / Julia Genster -- Clarissa versus Lovelace / Serge Soupel -- Dryden’s part in Clarissa / Rachel Trickett -- Reading the body in Clarissa / Julie McMaster -- Fatal letters / David Marshall -- Seduction pursued by other means / Isobel Grundy -- Eighteenth-century abduction laws and Clarissa / Jan I. Schwarz
- T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson, A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon) 1971.
- Alan D. McKillop, Samuel Richardson, Printer and Novelist (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1936; repr. Shoe String Press), 1960.
- Mark Kinkead-Weekes, Samuel Richardson: Dramatic Novelist (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1973).
- Margaret Anne Doody, A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels of Samuel Richardson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974).
- John Traugott, “Clarissa’s Richardson: An Essay to Find the Reader,” in English Literature in the Age of Disguise, ed. Maximillian Novak, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977.
- Carol Houlihan Flynn, Samuel Richardson: A Man of Letters (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1982).
- Florian Stuber, On Fathers and Authority in Clarissa, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 25, No. 3, Restoration and Eighteenth Century (Summer, 1985), pp. 557-574.
- John Zomchick, "Tame Spirits, Brave Fellows, and the Web of Law: Robert Lovelace's Legalistic Conscience," ELH, Vol. 53, No. 1 (Spring, 1986), pp. 99-120. This article became part of his book Family and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge, 1993).
- Richard Hannaford, "Playing her dead hand: Clarissa's posthumous letters", Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 35:1 (1993:Spring) p.79
- James Grantham Turner, "Richardson and His Circle," in The Columbia History of the British Novel, ed. John Richetti (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 73-101.
- Murray L. Brown, ed., "Refiguring Richardson's Clarissa," Studies in the Literary Imagination 28 (Spring 1995).
- Margaret Anne Doody, "Samuel Richardson: Fiction and Knowledge," in The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, ed. John Richetti (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 90-119.
- Janine Barchas, "The Engraved Score in Clarissa: An Intersection of Music, Narrative, and Graphic Design," Eight.eenth-Century-Life, 1996 May, 20:2, 1-20.
- Ann Louise Kibbie, The Estate, the Corpse, and the Letter: Posthumous Possession in Clarissa, ELH, Vol. 74, No. 1 (Spring, 2007), pp. 117-143.