Transcending the Material Self: Reading Ghosts in Samuel Richardson\u27s Novel Clarissa

This thesis presents an analysis of the ghosts in Samuel Richardson’s 1747-48 novel Clarissa, and synthesizes traditional literary criticism on that novel with British folklore and ghost traditions. It examines the novel historically and demonstrates that Richardson’s novelistic approach changed between 1740 when he wrote Pamela and 1747 when he began writing Clarissa in that he relies on the ghost image to discuss the complexities of individual identity. In Clarissa, Richardson outdoes his previous attempt at depicting reality in Pamela because his use of the ghost motif allows the audience to see beyond the physical reality of the plot into the spiritual depths of the human heart. Clarissa involves the journey of a young woman attempting to establish a sense of identity and selfhood, and the ghosts of the novel supply a lens for interpreting her course toward a sense of self that transcends the material world, its wants, its objectives, its myriad institutions, and the identity she has constructed by association with those entities

What a Poor, Passive Machine : The Psychosomatic Heroine from Richardson to Austen

This project examines the psychosomatic heroine, a character type I observe emerging throughout the long eighteenth-century who responds to social, domestic, and personal pressures and stressors with mental and emotional preoccupations that lead to physiological symptoms. I demonstrate through close textual analysis that the psychosomatic heroine originates with Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa and continues as a trope that Frances Burney’s Cecilia and The Wanderer, Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion, and Geraldine Jewsbury’s The Half Sisters interrogate and transform. Like other heroine types, the psychosomatic heroine reveals sociocultural discourses that speak to what it means to be a woman in the long eighteenth-century. My project identifies, however, that unlike other heroine types, the psychosomatic heroine redefines ideas of women’s work in the eighteenth century. Rather than domestic work, maternal work, or professional work, the psychosomatic heroine demonstrates that the most important work a woman does is on and for herself: she must find a way to manage her mind-body reactions in order to present the necessary image that allows her to navigate her world

The English novel in the eighteenth century

In the chapter called "The Romantic Reaction" in Science and the Modern World. Alfred North Whitehead observes, It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression. Accordingly, it is to literature that we must look particularly in its more concrete forms, . . . . if we hope to discover the inward thoughts of a generation.1 The Eighteenth Century's outlook was very different from our own, but its "inward thoughts" have a particular relevance for us today. The century introduced the industrialism which has shaped the West, and its political philosophy was an important influence on the American revolutionists, particularly Thomas Jefferson. But its ideas differ so vastly from ours that the form of our civilization seems to rest on thought systems we now appear to doubt. It is possible that a study of the Eighteenth Century, using its literature as original source material, will lead not only to an appreciation of the period itself, but toward a discovery of its influences on its future and our past. Knowing something of its thoughts may help us to know ourselves in the making, to illuminate some of the dark and cluttered corners of our own confusion

Comedy and the “Tragic Complexion” of Tom Jones

Tony Richardson's 1963 film Tom Jones contains an image not explicitly authorized by Fielding?s novel: Tom, with a noose around his neck, being hanged. Fortuitously, he is rescued by Squire Western before gravity takes its toll. Although consistent with other dark film comedies of the 1960s, this image also has considerable basis in the text. Fielding begins the seventeenth book of Tom Jones by putting a hypothetical noose on his hero. With Tom imprisoned, charged with murder, and Sophia Western recaptured by her father, Fielding contemplates an ending for the novel

The villain in the eighteenth century novel and drama.

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston Universit