High school junior Clarissa Thomas has always made good choices. She studies hard to get good grades. She trains hard in swimming so she can be a city champion. She understands that these choices will have the desired consequence, which is getting into the college of her dreams. But what choices does she make when she falls in love? In this novel, Fifty Shades of Grey meets Encyclopedia Brown. When it comes to love and her body, Clarissa needs your help understanding choices and consequences. What will happen when you make Clarissas Choice?
This study also examines the connections among the plots: how Clarissa's self-scrutinizing response to the pressures of test and trial, and her refusal to achieve respectability at the expense of her integrity, is explained by her pursuit of Christian prudence; and how Lovelace's inability to fathom the disappearance of his tempter function after the rape, as well as his inability to respond as does Belford to Clarissa's exemplary influence, is an expression of his nature as protagonist in the Don Juan plot. Richardson conducts all three plots concurrently, Bueler demonstrates, by exploiting the psychologically and dramatistically rich resources of simultaneous dialogue and soliloquy inherent in the epistolary genre.
Falling into Matter examines the complex role of the body in the development of the English novel in the eighteenth century. Elizabeth R. Napier argues that despite an increasing emphasis on the need to present ideas in corporeal terms, early fiction writers continued to register spiritual and moral reservations about the centrality of the body to human and imaginative experience. Drawing on six works of early English fiction -- Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, Elizabeth Inchbald's A Simple Story, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein - Napier examines how authors grappled with technical and philosophical issues of the body, questioning its capacity for moral action, its relationship to individual freedom and dignity, and its role in the creation of art. Falling into Matter charts the course of the early novel as its authors engaged formally, stylistically, and thematically with the increasingly insistent role of the body in the new genre.
As Samuel Richardson's 'exemplar to her sex,’ Clarissa in the eponymous novel published in 1748 is the paradigmatic female victim. In Clarissa’s Ciphers, Terry Castle delineates the ways in which, in a world where only voice carries authority, Clarissa is repeatedly silenced, both metaphorically and literally. A victim of rape, she is first a victim of hermeneutic abuse. Drawing on feminist criticism and hermeneutic theory, Castle examines the question of authority in the novel. By tracing the patterns of abuse and exploitation that occur when meanings are arbitrarily and violently imposed, she explores the sexual politics of reading.
Taking up works by Samuel Richardson, James Fenimore Cooper, Sir Walter Scott, and Catharine Maria Sedgwick, among others, Jennifer B. Camden examines the role of secondary heroines in early British and American novels. By showing that they are a site for the displaced anxieties produced by the national ideals proffered in the novel, Camden offers an important intervention into the ways in which early novels use character to further ideologies of race, class, sex, and gender.
In an era of increased mobility and globalisation, a fast growing body of writing originates from authors who live in-between languages and cultures. In response to this challenge, transnational perspective offers a new approach to the growing body of cultural texts with an emphasis on experiences of migration, transculturation, bilingualism and (cultural) translation. The introductory analysis and the fifteen essays in this collection critically interrogate complex relations between transnational and translation studies, bringing to this dialogue a much needed gender perspective. Divided into three parts (From Transnational to Translational; Reading Across Borders and Transnational in Translation), they address a range of issues relevant for this debate, from theoretical problems to practical questions of literary criticism and translation, understood as an act of cultural interpretation. The volume mostly deals with contemporary literary and cultural production, but also with classical texts and modernist literature. Its particular quality is a strong (although not exclusive) focus on Central and East European literatures, and more generally on women writers. Its interdisciplinary, transnational and intercultural perspective makes it relevant across disciplinary boundaries, from literary and translation studies to gender studies, cultural studies and migration studies.
A sweeping argument that from the mid-seventeenth century until the mid-twentieth, the English-language novel encoded ideas equating race with liberty.
