Examples of Abstracts

Letter Writing and the Rise of the Novel: The Epistolary Literacy of Jane Johnson and Samuel Richard... 
Susan E. Whyman Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 70, No. 4 (2007), pp. 577-606
Abstract
Susan E. Whyman's article reconsiders “the rise of the novel” in light of a new cultural category, “epistolary literacy.” The writings of a provincial reader, Jane Johnson, are examined in relation to Samuel Richardson's novels. Richardson was aware of Johnson's epistolary literacy, and he encouraged and manipulated it to his advantage. He was an astute observer of historical trends such as the growth of literacy and of print culture, and the literary aspirations of women like Johnson. She responded to Richardson's fiction in ways that he encouraged. Yet her epistolary literacy also influenced the way he wrote and marketed his novels. Their relationship was a two-way street. The study of the novel, I suggest, can benefit by linking Johnson's epistolary literacy to Richardson's historical insights.

Ann Louise Kibbie, The Estate, the Corpse, and the Letter: Posthumous Possession in Clarissa, ELH, Vol. 74, No. 1 (Spring, 2007), pp. 117-143.
Abstract
Reading Clarissa as a philosophical ghost story, this essay focuses on three sites of contested ownership: the landed estate, the heroine's corpse, and the letters themselves. Each case allows Richardson to pursue the paradoxical notion of inalienable property, especially the inalienable property in the self, beyond the grave; and each case is the occasion for a struggle not just among living characters, but also between the living and the dead. Joining the corporation of the dead, Clarissa forges a ghostly and perpetual version of selfhood that, in its incorporeal and immortal nature, is allied with eighteenth-century notions of literary property.

Katherine Binhammer, "Knowing Love: The Epistemology of Clarissa," ELH, Volume 74, Number 4, Winter 2007, pp. 859-879.
Abstract
My essay focuses on the eighteenth-century gender revolution, in particular, how the obsessive retelling of seduction narratives provided contesting narratives for knowing love. Love's plot changes with the emergence of bourgeois ideology, a change which many feminist scholars interpret as negative for women. In doing so, scholars read late eighteenth-century seduction narratives as always already reflecting the nineteenth-century ideal of passive desexed femininity. My essay focuses on Samuel Richardson's paradigmatic novel Clarissa in order to demonstrate that Clarissa's multiple narratives provide contesting epistemologies. Clarissa shows that the ideal of passive femininity was not the only and inevitable outcome of the gender revolution and that the multiple plots in the novel reflect the heterogeneous terrain for knowing love in the mid-eighteenth century.

Pity, or the Providence of the Body in Richardson’s Clarissa
Chad Loewen-Schmidt Eighteenth Century Fiction, Volume 22, Number 1, Fall 2009, pp. 1-28 (Article)
Abstract
Beginning in the late seventeenth century, pity, which traditionally had been seen as a morally suspect rhetorical effect, is embraced as an authenticating vehicle of social consensus and political critique. This essay examines pity’s mediatory instrumentality, the historical rationale for its rise in the eighteenth century, and the corresponding ways in which its new sociopolitical status inspires formal innovation and alternative visions of ethical communion in Clarissa. Anxious about change but eager to develop a vision of human nature and social coherence antithetical to the Hobbesean version, its proponents conceived of pity as a natural reflex, an embodied yet sanctified impulse capable of transforming fictional suffering and readerly experience into a medium of solidarity. By transferring to the affects the ethical-spiritual authority and the aesthetic function conventionally afforded to the will, reason, and their equivalent literary conventions—poetic justice, Horatian decorum, and the unified plot—in Clarissa, I argue, Samuel Richardson seeks to make pity a dynamic engine of social, literary-formal, and religious reformation.

 

How Literature Becomes Knowledge: A Case Study
Robin ValenzaELH, Volume 76, Number 1, Spring 2009, pp. 215-245 (Article)
The first section of the essay inquires, "Is literature a special kind of knowledge?"; the second, "Is literary criticism a special kind of knowledge?" Through an analysis of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa and Samuel Johnson's Dictionary, the essay shows how a literary work's status as an object of knowledge can be determined by its use. The essay proposes that the eighteenth-century notion of "index-learning"–reading a text by way of its index–and its more recent incarnation–"search engine learning"–combined with techniques of close reading can yield a new kind of literary-critical knowledge that might be called "slow reading."

“I was also absent at my dairy-house”: The Representation and Symbolic Function of the Dairy House in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. Karen Lipsedge
Eighteenth Century Fiction, Volume 22, Number 1, Fall 2009, pp. 29-48 (Article)
Abstract
Exploring the symbolic function of the dairy house in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa helps to unearth the novel’s commentary on the relation between garden buildings and concepts of self. An examination of recent work on the role of space in the novel and eighteenth-century architectural manuals and images reveals how Richardson’s representation of the dairy house intersects with contemporary ideas of self and interiority. Richardson employs the dairy house’s removed location at her grandfather’s estate and the reason for its construction (her grandfather constructed it for Clarissa in honour of her skills in dairy house management) to emphasize Clarissa’s independence, self-sufficiency, and command of space. He draws on the dairy house’s association with Arcadian rural simplicity and wholesome purity to underline Clarissa’s exemplary piety and pastoral innocence. As a symbol, her dairy house also reinforces the distance between Clarissa and the Harlowes’ economic ambitions.

 

Remarks on Richardson: Sarah Fielding and the Rational Reader
Emily C. Friedman Eighteenth Century Fiction, Volume 22, Number 2, Winter 2009-10, pp. 309-326 (Article)
Abstract
Sarah Fielding promoted rational reading practices through techniques that often differed from those used in the mid-eighteenth-century novel, particularly the contrary techniques employed by Samuel Richardson and her brother, Henry Fielding. Examining Fielding’s Remarks on Clarissa and her co-authored “dramatic fable”The Cry, this essay argues that Fielding creates textual spaces where her readers can and should examine their similarities with imperfect objects. Through both character and form, Fielding provides a number of “hooks” into her central message, all designed to engage more than one type of reader. At the same time, Fielding’s work provides commentary on the work of her friend and mentor Samuel Richardson: explicitly inRemarks on Clarissa and implicitly in The Cry, the latter of which engages with Richardson’s final novel, Sir Charles Grandison, in ways that have not been noted until now.

 

Karen Lipsedge
‘A Place of Refuge, Seduction or Danger?: The Representation of the Ivy Summer-House in Samuel Richardson's Clarissa’ 
Journal of Design History Advance Access published on August 18, 2006 
By the mid-eighteenth century, English novelists began to pay increased attention to the domestic interiors of their fictional characters. This development is worth investigating as it is related to concurrent changes in interior design and the cultural perception and use of domestic space. A novel that provides a useful commentary on the contribution these changes made to fictional representations of interiors is Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (1748–49). In the first two volumes of Clarissa, for instance, Richardson draws not only on the relationship between private and social space in eighteenth-century houses and gardens but also on the role of artefacts in social practices to articulate the novel's key themes: a woman's lack of control over domestic space, and the dangerous consequences of acquisitiveness. The broad aims of this article are, therefore, to use recent work on eighteenth-century interior and garden design, as well as eighteenth-century landscape and architectural manuals, to investigate the relationship Richardson establishes between domestic space, garden buildings and gender, in the first twovolumes of Clarissa. This investigation will also reveal how an awareness of the relationship between ‘real’ and fictional spaces can expand a design historian's understanding of eighteenth-century concepts of domestic space and domesticity.

 

Chuck Lawlor, 'Long grief, dark melancholy, hopeless natural love': Clarissa, Cheyne and narratives of body and soul.
Abstract:
The paper deals with Clarissa's wasting combination of love and religious melancholy, and the way in which ailments of the mind have an immediate effect on the body in this period. George Cheyne's theories of melancholy and hypochondria explain at least some of the mechanisms by which the eighteenth century understood this phenomenon. 'Clarissa' is an important text because it influenced so many later representations of melancholy, especially as it is gendered feminine in Richardson's newly feminised discourse of sensibility.
Title:  Gesnerus     Volume:  63     ISSN:  0016-9161     ISO Abbreviation:  Gesnerus     Publication Date:  2006    [I got this citation from BioMedSearch.com!]

 

Pious Frauds: `Honest Tricks' and the Patterns of Anglican Devotional Thought in Richardson
Author: LATIMER, BONNIE1
Source: Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Volume 32, Number 3, September 2009 , pp. 339-351(13)
Publisher: Blackwell Publishing

Abstract:
Even innocence itself has many a wile. 1 Abstract
This essay identifies a series of apparent deceptions by two of Richardson's iconic moral paragons, Clarissa Harlowe and Sir Charles Grandison. It uses early modern Anglican thought to argue that such deceptions are best seen as `lies'- but also that the same body of theology allows for `lying' in certain cases. Drawing on a range of Anglican thought from this period, it identifies in this literature a fascination with using `indirect means' to bring about the ends of virtue, and concludes that Richardson picks up on this intellectual thread in his staging of morally complex fictional scenarios.