Revisiting Richardson

Rebecca Anne Barr and Bonnie Latimer (Eds.)

2025
200 pages
$39.95
ISBN 9781684485659
Transits

The preoccupations of eighteenth-century novelist Samuel Richardson - the inequities of gender and sexuality; race and white femininity; masculinity, sadism, and control; religion and selfhood; authorship and artistic form - continue to resonate with contemporary readers. This fresh collection reconsiders his oeuvre, expanding and significantly updating critical debate on its meaning and importance. In these lively and engaging essays, contributors examine historically overlooked works, provide new readings of his best-known novels Pamela and Clarissa, and stake a serious claim for the importance of his final novel, Sir Charles Grandison. Diverse, inventive, and provocative, these essays demonstrate the complexity, relevance, and surprising legacies of Richardson's novels and characters - finding traces in post-conceptual poetry, detective fiction, and in the fantasies of historical romance. Revisiting Richardson reflects on a decade of scholarship while delivering innovative perspectives on an author whose work continues to be indispensable for understanding the history of the novel.

Contributors: Bonnie Latimer, Declan Kavanagh, Heather Ann Ladd, Amelia Dale, Samuel Rowe, Kerry Sinanan, Rebecca Anne Barr, Sarah Berkowitz, and E. Derek Taylor

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Reviews
"Revisiting Richardson brings to bear on this protean author the urgent critical and social concerns of the 2020s - including those of queer studies, critical race theory, debates about female happiness and male sexualities, conceptual writing, and genre fiction. The Richardson we encounter here is at once new and strangely familiar, timeless and of our time. A must-read for Richardsonians and those seeking to explore a presentist eighteenth century." ~Betty Schellenberg, coeditor of Samuel Richardson in Context

"Revisiting Richardson is a timely volume that reveals the exciting avenues left to explore in the work of one of the eighteenth century's most canonical authors. With scholarly approaches ranging from book history, to queer studies, to new formalism, to media studies, this volume offers new and exciting perspectives on the breadth of Richardson's works, from The Apprentice's Vade Mecum to Sir Charles Grandison." ~Rachel Scarborough King, editor of After Print: Eighteenth-Century Manuscript Cultures

"These original essays offer exciting, fresh approaches to Richardson's writings, fulfilling the promise of 'revisiting Richardson' but also seeking out his enduring influence in surprising new contexts. Questions of gender, sexuality, race, class, and selfhood come to the fore, which cements Richardson's relevance for 2025 and beyond." ~Nicholas Seager, coeditor of The Afterlives of Eighteenth-Century Fiction

"By situating Richardson in various contexts and approaches, this outstanding collection of essays will spark new critical conversations. Original in conception and execution, Revisiting Richardson marks an important moment in the long history of scholarship on the author of Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison." ~Albert J. Rivero, editor of The Sentimental Novel in the Eighteenth Century

About the editors:

REBECCA ANNE BARR is an associate professor in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge in the UK. She has published widely on gender, sexual violence, and the novel, and is coeditor of Bellies, Bowels, and Entrails in the Eighteenth Century and Ireland and Masculinities in History.

BONNIE LATIMER is a professor of Restoration and eighteenth-century literature at the University of Southampton in the UK, where she is also the associate dean for education in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. She has published on Richardson and various other eighteenth-century topics.

Distributed by Rutgers University Press

Cloth: $150, 9781684485666; Ebook: $39.95, 9781684485673