Clarissa: The Twentieth Century Response 1900-1950:: The Conversation About Clarissa, 1900-1950

by Janet Aikins Yount

Overview

This commanding two-volume project on Samuel Richardson’s classic is an essential source for 18th century studies. It presents the most valuable critical, intellectual and aesthetic responses to this great novel from 1900 to 1950, when Frank Kermode re-assessed the relative significance of Richardson and Henry Fielding and affirmed the superior “value” of Richardson’s moral and formal achievement.

Professor Yount pursues four main goals: to place the critical materials she has gathered here and reprinted in their immediate historical contexts; to offer insight into works conceived at a time when the discipline of English studies as we know it was in its earliest stages of development; to illuminate the significance of responses to Clarissa that seem outdated or naive by today’s scholarly standards; and to identify recurrent themes, highlighting the novel’s ongoing and often controversial appeal in the first half of the twentieth century.

These volumes reprint key commentaries and provide an introduction to the materials reprinted. They also offer scholarly background to these and discuss others omitted for reasons of space.

Contents Vol. 1: The Conversation About Clarissa, 1900-1950
Preface. Note on the Text. Acknowledgments. The Conversation about Clarissa: Clarissa, 1900–1914. Clarissa, 1915–1930. Clarissa, 1931–1944. Clarissa,1945–1950. Conclusion: Atonement: A Novel. Notes. Works Cited. Index.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781912224500
Publisher:	Edward Everett Root
Publication date:	03/31/2019
Pages:	1
Product dimensions:	7.37(w) x 10.46(h) x 0.72(d)

About the Author

Janet Aikins Yount is Professor Emerita of English, University of New Hampshire, where she taught from 1979 to 2012.

Table of Contents

Contents Vol. 1: The Conversation About Clarissa, 1900-1950

Preface. Note on the Text. Acknowledgments. The Conversation about Clarissa: Clarissa, 1900–1914. Clarissa, 1915–1930. Clarissa, 1931–1944.Clarissa, 1945–1950. Conclusion: Atonement: A Novel. Notes. Works Cited. Index.

Editorial Reviews

"Not every modernist scholar-critic embraced Clarissa but Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, and D.H. Lawrence engaged in vital debates about its substance, style, and narrative technique. Alongside these novelists are several literary critics well known to the academy, Austin Dobson, Ian Watt, and Joseph Wood Krutch, and many more who deserve to be better remembered, like Sheila Kaye-Smith and Dorothy Van Ghent. It’s rare to read a work as authoritative, comprehensive, and at the same time as perceptive as this reception study. Its presentation of these and other voices from across the Anglophone world will help make possible a thorough reconsideration of Richardson’s place in the rise of the novel. Students of the history of formal realism, the nature of bourgeois heroism, the rise of English studies in continental Europe, and the relation of early fiction to the intellectual and cultural history of its own time and ours, especially, will profit enormously from these pages." - Timothy Erwin, Professor of English, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

"Thank you, Janet Aikins Yount, for doing the heavy lifting for future scholars of Samuel Richardson! Never before have we had a critical heritage study of Clarissa this voluminous and complete. Documenting the novel’s influence through two world wars and up to the start of the Cold War, this meticulous combination of critical commentary and source material shows how Richardson’s eighteenth-century masterpiece rippled through the intellectual waters of the twentieth. Yount’s go-to reference work is sure to launch a new wave of interest in the most important novel ever written".
- Professor Janine Barchas, Louann and Larry Temple Centennial Professor in English Literature, University of Texas at Austin

"Janet Aikins Yount's edition is a fine achievement. It will be warmly welcomed as a major publication in literary studies." - Jocelyn Harris, Professor Emerita, University of Otago, NZ

From the Publisher