Overview

This commanding two-volume project on Samuel Richardson's classic is an essential source for 18th century studies. It presents the most valuable critical, intellectual and aesthetic responses to this great novel from 1900 to 1950. These volumes offer scholarly background to key commentaries.

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Thank you, Janet Aikins Yount, for doing the heavy lifting for future scholars of Samuel Richardson! Never before have we had a critical heritage study of Clarissa this voluminous and complete. Documenting the novel's influence through two world wars and up to the start of the Cold War, this meticulous combination of critical commentary and source material shows how Richardson's eighteenth-century masterpiece rippled through the intellectual waters of the twentieth. Yount's go-to reference work is sure to launch a new wave of interest in the most important novel ever written. - Professor Janine Barchas, Louann and Larry Temple Centennial Professor in English Literature, University of Texas at Austin. Janet Aikins Yount's remarkable edition of Clarissa: The Twentieth-Century Response 1900-1950 will prove a treasure trove for scholars and critics, including myself. After reading the whole, I marvel at Yount's commitment and first-rate analysis. Clarissa fully deserves the implied compliment, for even now, as Yount shows, Richardson's masterpiece remains a touchstone for academics and creative writers. In these volumes, Yount provides nothing less than an absorbing cultural and literary history of the early twentieth century. In the first, she argues convincingly that historical circumstances shaped different responses to the novel. In the second, she proves her case with a collection of comments about this brilliant, moving, and controversial work. A hundred years later, her revelation of a continuous, lively engagement with Clarissa speaks to current concerns such as the material conditions of production, contextual studies, and reception theory. Janet Aikins Yount's edition is a fine achievement. It will be warmly welcomed as a major publication in literary studies. - Jocelyn Harris, Professor emerita, University of Otago, NZ. The two volumes that make up The Conversation about Clarissa, 1900-1950 will delight readers of Samuel Richardson and students of eighteenth-century fiction alike. The first volume offers by way of introduction a fascinating tour of the most important ways in which twentieth-century Modernism understood Richardson - as an early apostle of feminism, a sociologist of the family, and a psychologist of individual sexual identity - while the second volume presents the considered opinions of threescore commentators, each entry accompanied by an informative headnote. Not every modernist scholar-critic embraced Clarissa but Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, and D.H. Lawrence engaged in vital debates about its substance, style, and narrative technique. Alongside these novelists are several literary critics well known to the academy, Austin Dobson, Ian Watt, and Joseph Wood Krutch, and many more who deserve to be better remembered, like Sheila Kaye-Smith and Dorothy Van Ghent. It's rare to read a work as authoritative, comprehensive, and at the same time as perceptive as this reception study. Its presentation of these and other voices from across the Anglophone world will help make possible a thorough reconsideration of Richardson's place in the rise of the novel. Students of the history of formal realism, the nature of bourgeois heroism, the rise of English studies in continental Europe, and the relation of early fiction to the intellectual and cultural history of its own time and ours, especially, will profit enormously from these pages. - Timothy Erwin, Professor of English, University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Janet Aikins Yount's edition is a fine achievement. It will be warmly welcomed as a major publication in literary studies. - Jocelyn Harris, Professor Emerita, University of Otago, NZ. Thank you, Janet Aikins Yount, for doing the heavy lifting for future scholars of Samuel Richardson! Never before have we had a critical heritage study of Clarissa this voluminous and complete. Documenting the novel's influence through two world wars and up to the start of the Cold War, this meticulous combination of critical commentary and source material shows how Richardson's eighteenth-century masterpiece rippled through the intellectual waters of the twentieth. Yount's go-to reference work is sure to launch a new wave of interest in the most important novel ever written. - Professor Janine Barchas, Louann and Larry Temple Centennial Professor in English Literature, University of Texas at Austin. Not every modernist scholar-critic embraced Clarissa but Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, and D.H. Lawrence engaged in vital debates about its substance, style, and narrative technique. Alongside these novelists are several literary critics well known to the academy, Austin Dobson, Ian Watt, and Joseph Wood Krutch, and many more who deserve to be better remembered, like Sheila Kaye-Smith and Dorothy Van Ghent. It's rare to read a work as authoritative, comprehensive, and at the same time as perceptive as this reception study. Its presentation of these and other voices from across the Anglophone world will help make possible a thorough reconsideration of Richardson's place in the rise of the novel. Students of the history of formal realism, the nature of bourgeois heroism, the rise of English studies in continental Europe, and the relation of early fiction to the intellectual and cultural history of its own time and ours, especially, will profit enormously from these pages. - Timothy Erwin, Professor of English, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

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Janet Aikins Yount is Professor Emerita of English, University of New Hampshire, where she taught from 1979 to 2012.

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