Styles of Meaning and Meanings of Style in Richardson's "Clarissa", and: Anger, Guilt, and the Psychology of Self in "Clarissa" (review)

102 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 13:1 onward "he has no supporters against Fielding for over twenty years" (pp. 2034 ). Not Michie's use of Jauss's sometimes inconvenient categories, his reliance on pre-existing bibliographies, or his focus on Anglo-American texts, but rather his application of a narrower instead of a broader definition of what counts as commentary on Richardson and Fielding may cause dissatisfaction with his general findings. Nevertheless, anyone aware of the vast quantity of material that Michie addresses will surely respect and enjoy his ambitious attempt to appraise it in a consistent and meaningful manner. He treats not only such influential commentators as Johnson, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Scott, Thackeray, Stephen, Leavis, and Watt but also a wealth of statements by less familar writers such as Margaret Oliphant (1869). His commentary on nineteenth-century reception is the most original and informative part of his study, since the response in this period has been the least well known. Furthermore, although his Jaussian project considers "how appreciations of Richardson or Fielding individually are significantly transformed when they are read as a pair" (p. 143), he does not make forced efforts to "get to the point where the Richardson/Fielding opposition can be transcended" (p. 17). Rather, in taking issue with the "institutionalized" and "ongoing distorton ofboth Richardson and Fielding as individual authors" (p. 193), his history of their "linked canonization " (p. 59) provides categories to use in seeking to recover and disentangle their intertwining but separate authorial questions with the help of "increasingly thorough and responsible biographical criticism" (p. 160). Michie's reception study, finally, sends us back to the task of interpreting Richardson's and Fielding's novels in relation to primary research that continues to interrogate the biographical and ideological conditions of the rivalrous production of their writings. David C. Hensley McGiIl University Gordon D. Fulton. Styles ofMeaning andMeanings ofStyle in Richardson 's "Clarissa". Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1999. xiv + 250pp. ISBN 0-7735-1849-5. Victor J. Lams. Anger, Guilt, and the Psychology of Self in "Clarissa". Bern and New York: Peter Lang, 1999. xvi + 210pp. US$46.95. ISBN 0-8204-4160-0. These two recent works on Clarissa take strongly theoretical perspectives on Richardson's great novel. Victor J. Lams's study adopts an eclectic array of psychological and theological perspectives, from Aquinas to Heinz Kohut and Paul Ricoeur, in order to explain the dynamics among the Harlowes, Clarissa, and Lovelace. Gordon D. Fulton, on the other hand, uses "literary stylistics," a sociohistorical linguistic approach, to analyse, primarily, the relationship between REVIEWS 103 Lovelace and Clarissa. Both books excel at sensitive, close analysis of textual particulars. Ultimately, Fulton's study contributes more to the current debate in scholarship about Clarissa, as he successfully relates his rhetorical concerns to issues of gender, social class, and historical change in eighteenth-century British literature. Fulton argues that through a self-conscious deployment of different linguistic registers, Richardson challenges readers to examine contemporary gender politics. Lams's book, filled as it is with striking local insights, seems out of touch with contemporary concerns, and its ahistorical approach makes it difficult to apply its analysis to fiction (or to social, linguistic, or psychological issues) beyond its own argument. Nonetheless, critics interested in Clarissa will want to read both Fulton and Lams. Styles ofMeaning and Meanings ofStyles comprises two sections which mirror the terms of the book's title. After a useful introduction to the linguistic theories that the book consistently employs, Fulton provides two chapters on shared resources that speakers employ in the novel: the related discourses of "proverb" and "moral sentiment." Both these forms of generalization serve individuals as shorthand means of communication. Unlike moral sentiments, proverbs do not depend on context to enact their meaning; they constitute an explicit style of meaning that depends on prior agreement between speaker and audience as to their validity. Obsessed with originality and irritated by Lord M.'s sententious (and culturally outdated) use of proverbs, Lovelace is nevertheless deeply affected by his "uncle's proverbialism" (p. 44). Clarissa, on the other hand, expresses herself in the mode of generalization that Fulton calls the "moral sentiment," which arises and...