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| 8/4/1749 |
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Tom Jones, Fielding, Richardson
On this day in 1749 Samuel Richardson fired another volley in his feud with Henry Fielding, in this instance the opinion that Fielding's popular hit, The History of Tom Jones, could only have been written by one "too prescribing, too impetuous, too immoral, I will venture to say, to take any other Byass than that a perverse and crooked Nature has given him; or Evil Habits, at least, have confirm'd in him." |
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Blackmask
Find electronic texts of Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison. |  | Criticisms of Pamela
Find abstracts of critical studies of Pamela, on topics including gender and social status. With comparisons to Fielding's Shamela and DeFoe's Moll Flanders.
"Tassie Gwilliam deals with the very complicated issue of feminine duplicity. The historical shift of the eighteenth-century from overt misogyny toward the Cult of the True Womanhood has been linked to 'women's presumed loss of productive work to an increase in leisure under capitalism, and thus to the new status of women as 'consumers rather than contributors to the household economy'." | | The Pamela Controversy
Find information about a six-volume scholarly work on the 18th century controversy over Pamela, from Pickering & Chatto Publishers.
"The Pamela controversy of the early 1740s remains a landmark of literary history. So intense were the Pamela vogue and surrounding quarrels that one contemporary wrote of a world divided 'into two different Parties, Pamelists and Antipamelists,' as though even the sensational political developments of the day had somehow been eclipsed. ... Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) is not only among the most important and influential of English novelists. He also remains, as he was in his own day, one of the most controversial. Criticism of the last two decades has established his novels as key texts for academic debate under a whole range of rubrics, among them psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism and deconstruction. Nothing today, however, can match the fierce energy and ideological charge of the controversy that immediately followed the bestselling success of his first novel...." | | The Cambridge History of English and American Literature
A historical text offers a lengthy study of the writer's place and role in English Literature during the Age of Johnson. Considers the author's life, influence, popularity, and major works (Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandisson). Also features commentary about Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, John Gay, Voltaire, Milton, Johnson, Boswell, and other writers.
"Together with the limitations of his art, those of his psychology and of his morals have grown more and more apparent, while their real strength is easily forgotten. His essential power was hardly personal; it was that of puritanism. His genius reached as deep as the consciousness of sin and the source of tears; but, in the depth of his emotions and in matters of conscience, he did not pass beyond the bounds of his time and of his class; and his intuitions possessed but little creative originality." | |
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The TinL masthead features photography by
Natasha D'Schommer
, and the book art featured is by Jim Rosenau.
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