Abstract

This thesis places Richardson in a tradition originally Neoplatonic and German that descends through Milton to the English Romantics and through Richardson back into Germany. I argue that Richardson plays a central role in the formation of Romantic dialectics as well as Romantic love. I begin by analyzing the roots of his Christian dialectic in Bohme's Contrarium, a double dialectic of will and desire that unlike the Neoplatonic dialectic resists the reconciliation of contradiction, and I discuss how it is represented in both Clarissa and Lovelace and inscribed on Clarissa's coffin in the shape of the ouraboros. Then I give a survey of Clarissa criticism to show the historical effect of the work on Richardson's readers, and, especially, to reconstruct the intimations of a dialectical view of Clarissa in the history of its misreading through the Kantian assumptions of its orthodox interpreters. The Romantic ethical and aesthetic premises of Richardson's twentieth-century critics lead to their claim to discover in his fiction, particularly Clarissa, an early expression of intellectual developments laid out in explicit conceptual and systematic detail only later in the history of philosophy. Until now, however, the limiting error of Richardson criticism has been to underestimate his novels as a source of Romantic forms of thought. I conclude, therefore, by offering a polemical reading of my own, arguing that the Kantian misconception of the novel has been more perceptive than anyone has claimed or intended, in that there is a significantly neglected relationship of intellectual influence between Richardson and Kant