The English novelist Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) brought dramatic intensity and psychological insight to the epistolary novel. Fiction, including the novel told in letters, had become popular in England before Samuel Richardson's time, but he was the...

Samuel Richardson, often in his own time compared to Shakespeare for universality, originality, and emotional truth, is generally acknowledged as the founder of a new school of novel writing in England. The new novel had its origins partly in English...

RIVERO, ALBERT J., (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996). 232 pp. $39.50. Hostile readers, confusing Samuel Richardson with his heroines, have sometimes complained, with Samuel Johnson, that there is always something Richardson prefers to the truth. The editor of this volume of...

Samuel Richardson's 'Pamela' uses visual art techniques and recognizable emblems to convey levels of meaning. Richardson is innovative in his use of visual hermeneutic in that his narrator-protagonist Pamela does not interpret the symbols. This simultaneously compels the reader to interpret the work and...

In the following essay, Stephen argues that Richardson 's integration of "feminine " characteristics into his style—namely, propensities for letter-writing, flattery, idle chatter, and "the delicate perception, the sensibility to emotion, and the interest in small details"—is responsible for both the merits and defects of his works.

In the following excerpt, McKillop surveys eighteenth-century criticism of Richardson's novels.

In the following essay, Guilhamet contends that undue emphasis has been placed on Richardson's realism. He suggests that, instead, the proper focus should be on the novelist's moral ideals.