scholarly journals Tarnished Virtues: From Richardson to Beardsley

2021 ◽  
pp. 98-120
Author(s):  
Tatiana A. Boborykina
Keyword(s):  
Reference Point ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Samuel Richardson ◽  
Henry Fielding ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Epistolary Novel ◽  
Word Combination ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Common Vision ◽  
Made In

The starting point of the article is a statement about “tarnished virtues” by one of the characters of Poor Folk, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s first novel. The word combination evokes various associations, allusions, and numerous variants of interpretation. A remark on virtues made in the frame of an epistolary novel immediately recalls the novels of a coryphaeus of the genre, 18th-Century English writer Samuel Richardson, especially his first one, in which the word “virtue” appears in the title – Pamela Or, Virtue Rewarded. However, Richardson’s comprehension of virtue seems to be quite narrow, a fact that had been already noticed by his contemporary writer Henry Fielding, who wrote a parody on Pamela. A brief analysis of the parody discovers a common vision on the nature of virtue by both Fielding and Dostoevsky, which becomes even clearer when one finds out their mutual reference point – Cervantes’ Don Quixote. The article explores other novels by Richardson, his influence upon European literature as well as his inner correlation with such writers as Karamzin and Pushkin. Besides, the article investigates the question – raised by its author some years ago – of a certain similarity between the plotlines of Clarissa and Poor Folk, the appearance of “Lovelace” in Dostoevsky’s first book, and the sudden turn of the plot from Richardson’s glorification of virtue to Dostoevsky’s dramatic realism. A few interpretations of Poor Folk are briefly analyzed, including that of Aubrey Beardsley, who illustrated the novel. Several explanations of the sentence on “tarnished virtues” are explored, and finally, the author offers a new one.

scholarly journals Tarnished Virtues: From Richardson to Beardsley

2021 ◽  
pp. 98-120
Author(s):  
Tatiana A. Boborykina
Keyword(s):  
Reference Point ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Samuel Richardson ◽  
Henry Fielding ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Epistolary Novel ◽  
Word Combination ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Common Vision ◽  
Made In

The starting point of the article is a statement about “tarnished virtues” by one of the characters of Poor Folk, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s first novel. The word combination evokes various associations, allusions, and numerous variants of interpretation. A remark on virtues made in the frame of an epistolary novel immediately recalls the novels of a coryphaeus of the genre, 18th-Century English writer Samuel Richardson, especially his first one, in which the word “virtue” appears in the title – Pamela Or, Virtue Rewarded. However, Richardson’s comprehension of virtue seems to be quite narrow, a fact that had been already noticed by his contemporary writer Henry Fielding, who wrote a parody on Pamela. A brief analysis of the parody discovers a common vision on the nature of virtue by both Fielding and Dostoevsky, which becomes even clearer when one finds out their mutual reference point – Cervantes’ Don Quixote. The article explores other novels by Richardson, his influence upon European literature as well as his inner correlation with such writers as Karamzin and Pushkin. Besides, the article investigates the question – raised by its author some years ago – of a certain similarity between the plotlines of Clarissa and Poor Folk, the appearance of “Lovelace” in Dostoevsky’s first book, and the sudden turn of the plot from Richardson’s glorification of virtue to Dostoevsky’s dramatic realism. A few interpretations of Poor Folk are briefly analyzed, including that of Aubrey Beardsley, who illustrated the novel. Several explanations of the sentence on “tarnished virtues” are explored, and finally, the author offers a new one.

scholarly journals Samuel Richardsons brevromaner

2007 ◽  
Vol 35 (103) ◽  
pp. 174-187
Author(s):  
Martin Hultén
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Samuel Richardson ◽  
Historical Understanding ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
History Of ◽  
Epistolary Novels ◽  
The Many ◽  
Professional Critics

En litteraturhistorisk placering The Epistolary Novels of Samuel Richardson: Reconsidering the Historical PerspectiveThe epistolary novels of Samuel Richardson were received with enthusiasm throughout Britain and Europe upon their publication in the 1740s and 50s, and they have had their unquestioned place in the literary canon and the literary history of the 18th century, as well as in the many rivalling Rise of the Novel narratives, ever since. The qualities of Richardson’s novels praised by contemporary reading audiences and professional critics were to some extent the qualities we still acknowledge in the the works. And yet I propose to reconsider and modify our ‘historical’ understanding of Richardson’s novels. Richardson scholars from the 1970s onward have deepened our understanding of the contexts of Richardson’s life and writing, and they have shown to what extent both the style, the form, the motifs, and the themes of his novels must be placed alongside the works of rival authors, today much less known, and the comedies and tragedies of the restoration period, just to mention two important fields of inspiration for Richardson. On the basis of their findings we must conclude that the novels we read today when considering Richardson’s works as part of a formal literary history are not quite the same as the novels contemporary readers cherished. There are important differences as well as correspondences between the contemporary reception of Richardson’s works and the reception of professional scholars in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The Pamela Debate

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Lockwood
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Samuel Richardson ◽  
Henry Fielding ◽  
Usual Sense ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Tom Jones ◽  
To Come ◽  
As If

This chapter examines a decisive period in English literary history during the 1740s. This decade saw Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding falling into an unplanned but extraordinary artistic competition that would open two vital channels of production in the novel-writing to come: in Richardson's case toward the representation of inward experience as if mediated by no external authority, in Fielding's toward worldly experience as if mediated wholly by an authoritative storyteller. They did not compete in the usual sense, but such was their entangled proximity it nevertheless seemed a contest. The decade began with Richardson's Pamela (1740), followed by Fielding's Joseph Andrews (1742), and ended with Richardson's Clarissa (1747–8) and Fielding's Tom Jones (1749). This second pair of novels has long since established itself as the more powerful of the two, rightly enough, but against any other novels of the period the first would easily command superiority.

scholarly journals Editorial

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. v-viii
Author(s):  
Graham Holderness
Keyword(s):  
Jane Austen ◽  
Daniel Defoe ◽  
Samuel Richardson ◽  
Henry Fielding ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
Conduct Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Age Of Reason ◽  
The Past ◽  
New Novel

When I first studied the novel, the form was believed to have originated in the eighteenth century with the fiction of Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson, and was synonymous with literary realism. The novel emerged from the Age of Reason, was closely associated with journalism, satire and conduct literature, and marked a profound break with the supernatural, fantastic and romance narratives of the past. Its perfect embodiment was to be found in the work of Jane Austen, even today an immensely popular writer, and widely regarded as a defining practitioner of the novel form. This kind of novel was/is in every respect different from Shakespeare: new, ‘novel’, not old; prose, not poetry; narrative, not dramatic; realist, not magical; fictional, not metafictional; and could deal with Shakespeare only as an objective feature of the society and culture being represented.

scholarly journals Konspirator Konarski ponownie zakonspirowany. Szyfr zegarmistrzowski w Interesujących mężczyznach Leskowa

2019 ◽  
pp. 387-408
Author(s):  
Jan Zieliński
Keyword(s):  
18Th Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Starting Point

The starting point is Interesting Men, a novel by Russian prose writer Nikolai Leskov, in which the motif of 18th-century English inventor Graham’s clocks plays an important role. The novel contains a quotation in Polish thas is attributed by Leskow to Zygmunt Krasiński, but in fact it comes from a poem by Szymon Konarski, a Polish conspirator, who was shot in 1839. By profession, Konarski was a watchmaker specializing in the so-called Graham’s escapements. The article puts forward a hypothesis that Leskov knew the biography of the victim and wanted to commemorate his fate in his novel, omitting the tsarist censorship

‘Moral Romance’ and the Novel at Mid-Century

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Sabor
Keyword(s):  
Samuel Richardson ◽  
Henry Fielding ◽  
The State ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sarah Fielding

This chapter discusses several developments pertaining to the phenomenon of ‘moral romance’ as well as the state of the novel at mid-century. The 1740s were a pivotal decade for the novel in English, particularly because of the rivalry between Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding. Both writers notably disparaged conventional ideas about romance. In addition, the chapter explores moral romance in Sarah Fielding's The Adventures of David Simple (1744). It shows that, although she uses the phrase ‘Moral Romance’ so diffidently in her short-lived Advertisement, Sarah Fielding has more to say about romance- and novel-writing within David Simple itself. Finally, the chapter considers the state of the novel at mid-century.

The Dramatic Background of Richardson's Plots and Characters

PMLA ◽  
1968 ◽  
Vol 83 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ira Konigsberg
Keyword(s):  
Samuel Richardson ◽  
Henry Fielding ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Charles Johnson ◽  
English Drama ◽  
Character Types

Samuel Richardson used in his novels character types and plots already developed in the English drama. Playwrights such as Charles Johnson, George Lillo, and even Henry Fielding had presented the same story as Pamela—the attempted seduction of a poor but innocent maiden by a well-born rake— and characters similar to the novel's virgin heroine and libertine hero. In the first part of Clarissa Richardson handled a theme common in the drama, that of enforced betrothal, and developed this theme with characterizations, character relationships, and dramatic confrontations already used by playwrights. Throughout the novel Clarissa resembles a type of suffering heroine and Lovelace a type of rakish villain popular in the drama, and the second part of the novel strikingly resembles Charles Johnson's play Caelia. The characters of Sir Charles Grandison also have their dramatic counterparts, especially the hero, who is clearly a product of the theater's men of sense.

L’absence chez Michel Butor. L’Emploi du temps et Degrés

2012 ◽  
pp. 66-80
Author(s):  
Michał Mrozowicki
Keyword(s):  
Human Memory ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Narrative Discourse ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Michel Butor ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
One Year ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Narrative Mode ◽  
The City

Michel Butor, born in 1926, one of the leaders of the French New Novel movement, has written only four novels between 1954 and 1960. The most famous of them is La Modification (Second thoughts), published in 1957. The author of the paper analyzes two other Butor’s novels: L’Emploi du temps (Passing time) – 1956, and Degrés (Degrees) – 1960. The theme of absence is crucial in both of them. In the former, the novel, presented as the diary of Jacques Revel, a young Frenchman spending a year in Bleston (a fictitious English city vaguely similar to Manchester), describes the narrator’s struggle to survive in a double – spatial and temporal – labyrinth. The first of them, formed by Bleston’s streets, squares and parks, is symbolized by the City plan. During his one year sojourn in the city, using its plan, Revel learns patiently how to move in its different districts, and in its strange labyrinth – strange because devoid any centre – that at the end stops annoying him. The other, the temporal one, symbolized by the diary itself, the labyrinth of the human memory, discovered by the narrator rather lately, somewhere in the middle of the year passed in Bleston, becomes, by contrast, more and more dense and complex, which is reflected by an increasinly complex narration used to describe the past. However, at the moment Revel is leaving the city, he is still unable to recall and to describe the events of the 29th of February 1952. This gap, this absence, symbolizes his defeat as the narrator, and, in the same time, the human memory’s limits. In Degrees temporal and spatial structures are also very important. This time round, however, the problems of the narration itself, become predominant. Considered from this point of view, the novel announces Gerard Genette’s work Narrative Discourse and his theoretical discussion of two narratological categories: narrative voice and narrative mode. Having transgressed his narrative competences, Pierre Vernier, the narrator of the first and the second parts of the novel, who, taking as a starting point, a complete account of one hour at school, tries to describe the whole world and various aspects of the human civilization for the benefit of his nephew, Pierre Eller, must fail and disappear, as the narrator, from the third part, which is narrated by another narrator, less audacious and more credible.

TYPES OF HEDONISM ON THE MAIN CHARACTER SIR WALTER ELLIOT IN THE NOVEL PERSUASION BY JANE AUSTEN

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-43
Author(s):  
Enggin Valufi ◽  
Retno Budi Astuti
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Method ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Philosophical Approach ◽  
High Culture ◽  
Descriptive Qualitative

Hedonism is a view of life in philosophy that seeks to avoid pain and make pleasure as the main goal in life. People who embrace hedonism tend to over-pursue pleasure. The hedonism lifestyle is mostly carried out by 18th century people especially the nobles who live in high culture. They are as close to hedonism as they are in the Persuasion novel by Jane Austen. Sir Walter Elliot the main character is a nobleman who did a lot of hedonism. Hedonism which is seen as too glorifying personal pleasure to ignore others. The purpose of this study was to find out the types of hedonism done by Sir Walter Elliot in Persuasion. This research uses descriptive qualitative method because all data are in the form of sentences. The researcher uses a philosophical approach and analyzes data using Weijers' theory as the main theory. The results of this study found that Sir Walter Elliot performed two types of hedonism, namely aesthetic hedonism and selfish hedonism.

Man and Wife

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wilkie Collins
Keyword(s):  
Legal Status ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Country House ◽  
Radical Critique ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Marriage Laws ◽  
Woman In White ◽  
The Moonstone ◽  
Status Of Women

This time the fiction is founded upon facts' stated Wilkie Collins in his Preface to Man and Wife (1870). Many Victorian writers responded to contemporary debates on the rights and the legal status of women, and here Collins questions the deeply inequitable marriage laws of his day. Man and Wife examines the plight of a woman who, promised marriage by one man, comes to believe that she may inadvertently have gone through a form of marriage with his friend, as recognized by the archaic laws of Scotland and Ireland. From this starting-point Collins develops a radical critique of the values and conventions of Victorian society. Collins had already developed a reputation as the master of the 'sensation novel', and Man and Wife is as fast moving and unpredictable as The Moonstone and The Woman in White. During the novel the atmosphere grows increasingly sinister as the setting moves from a country house to a London suburb and a world of confinement, plotting, and murder.

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