This three-volume set brings together all that Samuel Richardson himself published on the composition, printing and interpretation of "Clarissa". The various short works reveal Richardson's reactions to the concerns and issues raised by contemporary readers.

This three-volume set brings together all that Samuel Richardson himself published on the composition, printing and interpretation of "Clarissa". The various short works reveal Richardson's reactions to the concerns and issues raised by contemporary readers.

This three-volume set brings together all that Samuel Richardson himself published on the composition, printing and interpretation of "Clarissa". The various short works reveal Richardson's reactions to the concerns and issues raised by contemporary readers.

This three-volume set brings together all that Samuel Richardson himself published on the composition, printing and interpretation of "Clarissa". The various short works reveal Richardson's reactions to the concerns and issues raised by contemporary readers.

Treating Frances Burney (1752-1840) with the seriousness usually reserved for later novelists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Margaret Anne Doody combines biographical narrative with informed literary criticism as she analyzes not only Burney's published novels, but her plays, fragments of novels, poems, and other works never published. Doody also draws upon a mine of letters and diaries for detailed and sometimes surprising biographical information. Burney's feelings and emotions forcefully emerge in her sophisticated and complex late novels, Camilla and The Wanderer. Her novels all relate to personal experience; as an artist she is attracted to the violent, the grotesque, and the macabre. She is a powerful comic writer, but her comedy is far from reflecting a shallow cheerfulness. Bringing a novelist's perspective to her material, in this 1989 book Doody shows an appreciation of the many dimensions of a predecessor's writings and she tells her story with force and conviction.

This 1989 volume was created to mark the three-hundredth anniversary of Samuel Richardson's birth, with fifteen essays, some illustrated, by contributors who investigate various aspects of the novelist's work. The essays offer fresh readings of individual novels and of Richardson's whole oeuvre. Subjects range from an examination of reactions to Pamela to observations on patterns of male friendship in the novels. Richardson's personal epistolary production is studied by several of the contributors, one of whom makes a strong appeal for the publication of Richardson's complete correspondence. A strikingly original essay explores the novelist's temporal and geographical world, in relation to the real London of the time. This important collection, festive in spirit but sharp, scholarly and brilliantly multi-faceted, is a landmark in Richardson studies.

In Jane Austen's works, a name is never just a name. In fact, the names Austen gives her characters and places are as rich in subtle meaning as her prose itself. Wiltshire, for example, the home county of Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey, is a clue that this heroine is not as stupid as she seems: according to legend, cunning Wiltshire residents caught hiding contraband in a pond capitalized on a reputation for ignorance by claiming they were digging up a big cheese the moon's reflection on the water's surface. It worked. In Jane Austen's Names, Margaret Doody offers a fascinating and comprehensive study of all the names of people and places real and imaginary in Austen's fiction. Austen's creative choice of names reveals not only her virtuosic talent for riddles and puns. Her names also pick up deep stories from English history, especially the various civil wars, and the blood-tinged differences that played out in the reign of Henry VIII, a period to which she often returns. Considering the major novels alongside unfinished works and juvenilia, Doody shows how Austen's names signal class tensions as well as regional, ethnic, and religious differences. We gain a new understanding of Austen's technique of creative anachronism, which plays with and against her skillfully deployed realism in her books, the conflicts of the past swirl into the tensions of the present, transporting readers beyond the Regency. Full of insight and surprises for even the most devoted Janeite, Jane Austen's Names will revolutionize how we read Austen's fiction.

The Daring Muse is a challenging account of the richness and complexity of Augustan poetry. It takes in a broad range of writers from the Restoration to the Regency, from Rochester and Dryden to Cowper and Crabbe, and shows the essential connections between them. Augustan poetry has too often been thought of as uniform, staidly classical, even dull. Margaret Doody explodes this myth once and for all. She shows it to be poetry of great energy and diversity: of extravagant conceits, subversive parody, incessant stylistic and formal experimentation; a self-consciously innovative poetry that sought to express and extend the perpetual, restless activity of the human mind. Both the principles and techniques of the verse are related to similar elements in the novels of the period; the book's numerous illustrations help to show how the poems were presented and interpreted in their own time.

In Jane Austen's works, a name is never just a name. In fact, the names Austen gives her characters and places are as rich in subtle meaning as her prose itself. Wiltshire, for example, the home county of Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey, is a clue that this heroine is not as stupid as she seems: according to legend, cunning Wiltshire residents caught hiding contraband in a pond capitalized on a reputation for ignorance by claiming they were digging up a "big cheese" - the moon's reflection on the water's surface. It worked. In Jane Austen's Names, Margaret Doody offers a fascinating and comprehensive study of all the names of people and places - real and imaginary - in Austen's fiction. Austen's creative choice of names reveals not only her virtuosic talent for riddles and puns. Her names also pick up deep stories from English history, especially the various civil wars, and the blood-tinged differences that played out in the reign of Henry VIII, a period to which she often returns. Considering the major novels alongside unfinished works and juvenilia, Doody shows how Austen's names signal class tensions as well as regional, ethnic, and religious differences. We gain a new understanding of Austen's technique of creative anachronism, which plays with and against her skillfully deployed realism - in her books, the conflicts of the past swirl into the tensions of the present, transporting readers beyond the Regency. Full of insight and surprises for even the most devoted Janeite, Jane Austen's Names will revolutionize how we read Austen's fiction.

The Female Quixote (1752), a vivacious and ironical novel parodying the style of Cervantes, portrays the beautiful and aristocratic Arabella, whose passion for reading romances leads her into all manner of misunderstandings. Praised by Fielding, Richardson and Samuel Johnson, the book quickly established Charlotte Lennox as a foremost writer of the Novel of Sentiment. With an excellent introduction and full explanatory notes, this edition will be of particular interest to students of women's literature, and of the eighteenth-century novel. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Treating Frances Burney (1752-1840) with the seriousness usually reserved for later novelists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Margaret Anne Doody combines biographical narrative with informed literary criticism as she analyzes not only Burney's published novels, but her plays, fragments of novels, poems, and other works never published. Doody also draws upon a mine of letters and diaries for detailed and sometimes surprising biographical information. Burney's feelings and emotions forcefully emerge in her sophisticated and complex late novels, Camilla and The Wanderer. Her novels all relate to personal experience; as an artist she is attracted to the violent, the grotesque, and the macabre. She is a powerful comic writer, but her comedy is far from reflecting a shallow cheerfulness. Bringing a novelist's perspective to her material, in this 1989 book Doody shows an appreciation of the many dimensions of a predecessor's writings and she tells her story with force and conviction.

Twentieth-century historians and critics defending the novel have emphasized its role as superseding something else, as a sort of legitimate usurper that deposed the Epic, a replacement of myth, or religious narrative. To say that the Age of Early Christianity was really also the Age of the Novel rumples such historical tidiness--but so it was. From the outset of her discussion, Doody rejects the conventional Anglo-Saxon distinction between Romance and Novel. This eighteenth-century distinction, she maintains, served both to keep the foreign--dark-skinned peoples, strange speakers, Muslims, and others--largely out of literature, and to obscure the diverse nature of the novel itself.This deeply informed and truly comparative work is staggering in its breadth. Doody treats not only recognized classics, but also works of usually unacknowledged subgenres--new readings of novels like The Pickwick Papers, Puddn'head Wilson, L'Assommoir, Death in Venice, and Beloved are accompanied by insights into Death on the Nile or The Wind in the Willows. Non-Western writers like Chinua Achebe and Witi Ihimaera are also included. In her last section, Doody goes on to show that Chinese and Japanese novels, early and late, bear a strong and not incidental affinity to their Western counterparts. Collectively, these readings offer the basis for a serious reassessment of the history and the nature of the novel.The True Story of the Novel marks the beginning of the twenty-first century's understanding of fiction and of culture. It is essential reading for anyone with an interest in literature.

Cecilia is an heiress, but she can only keep her fortune if her husband will consent to take her surname. Fanny Burney's unusual love story and deft social satire was much admired on its first publication in 1782 for its subtle interweaving of comedy, humanity, and social analysis. Controversial in its time, this eighteenth-century novel seems entirely fresh in relation to late twentieth-century concerns. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.