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Clarissa (review)
- Eighteenth-Century Fiction
- University of Toronto Press
- Volume 5, Number 3, April 1993
- pp. 285-287
- 10.1353/ecf.1993.0009
- Review
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
REVIEWS 285 right about the choice of illustration for Musaeus: the sensational climax of Hero and Leander's story is ignored for what Stewart calls "an undynamic love allegory" (pp. 2829 ), which is in fact a fairly dramatic and richly ironic encounter between a priestess and a panting lover before a statue of Venus in her temple. A woman dreaming of her absent husband is called "a sentimental motif," a "saccharine moralization" (p. 176). And yet the sentimental themes portrayed on pages 46, 47 and 51, Stewart's splendid discussions of death, tragedy, and Abelard's castration, and the powerful portrayal of jealousy and revenge by Berquin would seem to show that sentimental and related emotional themes are often present (pp. 59-61, 69) and that the scholar does them justice. Similarly, the theme of Nature, with its contrasting elements of innocence and sexual experience, might have been more fully explored. Such strictures as these do not detract from the value of a subtle, readable, and impressively scholarly book. They are intended to recommend to the reader avenues for further investigation of important and fascinating themes suggested by this work. Jean H. Hagstrum Northwestern University Samuel Richardson. Clarissa. Facsimile of the Third Edition (1751), The Clarissa Project, 8 vols. With an introduction by Florian Stuber and bibliographic notes by O.M. Brack, Jr (New York: AMS Press, 1990). ISBN 0-404-64100-8. In 1973 Shirley Van Marter hoped her studies of Richardson's revisions in the second, third, and fourth editions of Clarissa would help the scholarly community to "decide which text represents the author's final intention, which one offers scholars the best critical text of Clarissa, which version achieves maximum power as an artistic masterpiece, and which one should finally be printed to make a popular edition available" ("Richardson 's Revisions of Clarissa in the Second Edition," Studies in Bibliography, p. 109). The publication of the first eight volumes of the AMS Press Clarissa Project, a facsimile of the third edition of Clarissa (1751), makes a powerful case for the third edition as the answer to Van Marter's first two questions. The text is buttressed by general editor Florian Stuber's Introduction—a compelling and comprehensive apologia for this text, even if it does not silence debate. Stuber's discussion of Clarissa as a novel of "process"—its successive publications an extension of the compositional procedure—establishes the third edition as the embodiment of Richardson's final intentions. Richardson's self-conscious remarks in successive prefaces indicate the provisional nature of the first and second editions and the culminating role of the third. Stuber argues convincingly that the new apparatus of the third edition—the ritual opening and closing dedicatory poems, the historicized Preface, the expanded Postscript, and the index-like "Collection of ... Sentiments"—asserts its finality. Finally, the last edition (1759) of the novel published during Richardson's life was entirely based on the third edition. For me, the extraordinarily graphic, "printerly" nature of the third edition reinforces Stuber's argument: whereas the first edition contained only three printer's devices over seven volumes to embellish the closure of the text, this number gradually increased to the thirteen devices punctuating conclusory text and apparatus over the eight volumes of the third edition, including a new Europa and the Bull device to end the "rape volume" (vol. 5), and to fulfil Lovelace's earlier musings about perpetrating "a rape worthy of a Jupiter" (1:237). 286 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 5:3 Since Stuber shows the "original intentions" of Richardson to be both irrelevant and irretrievable, the third edition, then, inevitably becomes the best critical text of Clarissa. The search for a "purest" edition, he claims, is a bibliographical fashion out of step with current concern for "genetically edited texts" (p. 18) and is unsuited to Richardson's compositional methods. In any case, the first edition by no means represents Richardson's original intentions (all manuscripts are lost). In a "first edition" of this Introduction ("On Original and Final Intentions, or Can There Be an Authoritative Clarissa!," Text [1985]), Stuber was merely "inclined" to believe that there were more than three successive versions of the novel prior...