Clarissa: the Eighteenth-Century Response, 1747-1804, Two Volume Set: Reading Clarissa/ Rewriting Clarissa

In the spirit of the ""Clarissa Project's"" emphasis on primary texts and contexts, ""Clarissa: The Eighteenth-Century Response, 1747-1804"" brings together examples of the extensive and impressively varied reaction to the novel from the moment of its publication to the first edition of Richardson's correspondence. Drawn from sources in Britain, the Continent, and North America, the material assembled by editor Lois E. Bueler ranges from casual readers' responses to extended critical essays in the major publications of the day; from verse elegies to poetic appreciations; from an English shopkeeper's diary to a distraught young German woman's plea for pastoral advice; from fictionalized conduct books to novels about the London sex trade; from debates among the most celebrated intellectuals of the century to dramatic adaptations written in four languages. ""Volume I, Reading Clarissa"", brings together some 200 separate texts to give a sense of the century's entire conversation about Clarissa. With this text readers will for the first time be able access and assess in a single volume not just the often-mentioned comments of such major figures as Johnson, Rousseau, and Diderot but also responses such as the German conversations surrounding von Haller, Gellert, and Klopstock; the commentary in the Correspondence litteraire; the novel's fortunes in translation, including the late but enthusiastic participation of the Spanish; the use of Clarissa and its characters in nearly a score of novels; references and extended arguments in didactic and conduct literature; and North American reactions from a verse paean to printing and printers to an enthusiastic consideration attributed to Charles Brockden Brown. ""Volume II, Rewriting Clarissa"", presents adaptations of the novel. While two of these are already available to the determined scholar - the Clarissa portion of ""The Paths of Virtue Delineated"" and George Colman's one-act farce ""Polly Honeycombe"" - the six full-length dramas Bueler has selected are extremely rare. The German, Spanish, and French plays she includes have never before been translated, and one of them - Nepomucene Lemercier's ""Lovelace"" - has not previously been printed. All the items mentioned in these related but independent volumes refer to, correct, or add to the standard Richardson bibliographies of Sarah W. R. Smith (1984) and R. G. Hannaford (1969). Each volume contains an index of names and brief biographies of the approximately 160 writers represented.