ENL 4112 Spring 2022 Ward

“I can go no farther. The affair is over. Clarissa lives.” (Lovelace to Belford)

The eighteenth century has long been identified by literary historians as the Age of the Novel; the works of Samuel Richardson have long been identified as foundational to the rise of that genre, influencing future novelists from the Marquis de Sade, to Jane Austen, to Virginia Woolf, to Vladimir Nabakov, to Toni Morrison. In this course, we are going to read ONE of the century’s most influential and compelling works of fiction: Richardson’s Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady. Consisting of a series of 537 (!) letters between four main correspondents (Clarissa Harlowe, her best friend Anna Howe, the villain Robert Lovelace, and his confident John Belford), this work encompasses a host of contemporary issues that remain central to our 21st-century conceptions of identity: constructions of gender and sexuality; definitions of “virtue” and “honesty”; distinctions between the public and private; formations of class consciousness; imbalances of power; notions of liberty and free will. As importantly, by emphasizing the physical and psychological contests between Clarissa and Lovelace, the novel dramatizes the violent constraints imposed against assertions of the self. Over the course of the 16-week semester, we will explore all of these issues and the overarching conditions that led to the production and circulation of eighteenth-century novels like Clarissa. We will read Richardson’s work alongside relevant works of secondary criticism.

This course meets the pre-1800 and Genre requirements for LMC majors.