Currents in the
Eighteenth-Century Novel useful to Richardson’s Pamela
Oroonoko (1688)
- Daring
choice of unlikely hero
- Distress
of captivity
Love in Excess (1719)
- Partially
epistolary mode and plot: letters sent, mis-sent,
read, misread, crossed
- Courtship
and power games played in society
- Key role
of reputation for men and women alike
- Notion
of different kinds of love
- Problem
of passion, agency, responsibility of those in love
Roxana (1724)
- Price of
female virtue/chastity vs. cost of economic survival
- Power of
telling one’s own story, control of narrative
- Coherence
of one’s story of oneself as measure of coherence of self
- Money and
class tensions
- First-person
female narrator; male author