Clarissa

Almost a million words long, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa took eighteenth-century readers by storm; it has a strong claim to be considered the single most important novel of the period. We'll begin with some brief excerpts from Richardson's first novel Pamela and one of the more virulent contemporary attacks on this new mode of popular fiction, then proceed through Clarissa in regular chunks, interspersed with bits and pieces of other relevant epistolary fictions, critical discussions and historical accounts. This seminar has no prerequisites other than your own eagerness to embark on a demented and potentially transformative program of extreme reading; topics for discussion will include the novel in letters, the first-person voice, the psychology of families and the sociology of inheritance in eighteenth-century England, the languages of sexuality, eighteenth-century burial customs, madness in literature, providential narratives and life after death, suffering, rewritings of Job, the rise of the novel, etc. etc.