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'Pamela' in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland
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$ 46.62
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| Item Number |
2408957 |
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Item Description...
Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) is often regarded as the first true novel in English and a landmark in literary history. As the best selling novel of its time, it provoked a swarm of responses: panegyrics and critiques, parodies and burlesques, piracies and sequels, comedies and operas. The controversy it inspired has become a standard point of reference in studies of the rise of the novel, the history of the book and the emergence of consumer culture. In the first book-length study of the Pamela controversy since 1960, Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor offer an original definitive account of the novel's enormous cultural impact. |
Item Specifications...
Pages 308
Dimensions: Length: 8.9" Width: 5.98" Height: 0.87"
Weight: 1.01 lbs.
Binding Softcover
Release Date Apr 30, 2009
ISBN 0521110181
EAN 9780521110181
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Availability 104 units.
Availability accurate as of May 27, 2012 08:54.
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Reviews - What do our customers think?
 | Pamela's Back on the Market Oct 24, 2009 |
Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor's 2005 book surveying the reactions and criticisms that followed the 1740 publication of Samuel Richardson's Pamela revives forgotten satires, spoofs, continuations and critiques surrounding Richardson's first classic. While informative and engaging, the book is not an easy venture for a Pamela amateur and should be approached with caution by those unversed in Richardson's prose. Avoiding plot summary of both the original Pamela and its counterparts and offshoots, Pamela in the Marketplace instead chooses to focus on the atmosphere of the literary marketplace in the mid to late 18th century, skipping haphazardly from one writer to the next in search of the answer to an elusive question: What about Pamela made it such an unforgettable sensation?
The book avoids an overview of specific criticisms of Pamela, and instead uses the published counterfictions as examples of historical context. According to Keymer and Sabor, representations of Pamela (or her foil) in other works symbolize the charged literary air of the times, an era without copyright laws when Richardson competed with dozens of writers in declaring the legitimacy of his authorship of Pamela. Keymer and Sabor seem to view Pamela itself as essentially a literary starting point, calling the novel a "compelling prototype for the domestic, epistolary and psychological fiction of the decades to come" (4). The novel itself, they repeatedly assure their readers, was not particularly innovative in its character development, plot, or even title, but Richardson's unique ability to package his text attractively and market it well gives Pamela its rightful place as one of the greatest amatory novels of the 18th century.
Richardson's seizing on the success of Pamela as both a vogue and a controversy and his innate sense of marketing (garnishing attention from not only media outlets but also sermons and celebrity appearances) is Keymer and Sabor's tentative answer to the question of the novel's immediate and lasting success (25-27). Richardson, a well-known and successful printer in London's "Grub Street" marketplace, used his status as writer and publisher of Pamela for all it was worth. By agreeing to print several of his critics' pamphlets which harshly condemned Pamela and by allegedly writing criticism of his own novel in order to boost publishing sales, Richardson not only profiting from others' criticism but also that which he created himself. Richardson epitomized the 18th century literary view of publishing as a career versus an outlet for creative expression (5). Writers wrote for money, and Richardson as well as others who benefited from Pamela's narrative appeal exploited their public's insatiable eagerness for cheap, entertaining fiction. Keymer and Sabor spend the most time on the major Pamela offshoots, including Henry Fielding's Shamela, Eliza Haywood's Anti-Pamela and John Kelly's Pamela's Conduct in High Life and examine as well an anonymous Irish precursor to Pamela written in 1693 entitled Vertue Rewarded; or, the Irish Princess.
Dozens of authors, playwrights, pamphleteers, publishers, editors, poets and opera composers are mentioned throughout Pamela in the Marketplace, and a hefty portion of the book is devoted to their biography and publication history. While these writers certainly do emphasize Keymer and Sabor's point that Pamela served as inspiration for more publications than Richardson could handle, the overall purpose of the extended portraits seems lost since they appear wedged between chapters on contextual and historical significance. Yet the evidence speaks for itself: Pamela was more than a novel, it was a product. Pamela's fame cannot be defined solely in terms of book sales (which expanded beyond Richardson's belief after gaining international success in France as well as Ireland), since the novel's influence extended to the furthest reactions of the artistic sphere. As the inspiration for plays, ballad operas, paintings, engraved illustrations, fans and wax figures, Pamela the woman became a commercial legend rather than a literary heroine.
However, besides endlessly expanding the various reasons and evidence for Pamela's lasting fame, Keymer and Sabor fail to outline clearly their purpose for writing. The book would doubtlessly be useful to any Richardsonian scholar or avid literary critic, but more plebeian audiences might feel left without a real sense of why this book would logically follow an academic or leisure reading of Pamela. As an inexperienced scholar, reading Pamela in the Marketplace left me with, if nothing else, a sense of the cutthroat publishing competition that surrounded London's "Grub Street" of the mid 1700's and a taste of the prolific publication and consumption that would follow such a landmark text as Pamela.
Pamela in the Marketplace is written in a succinct and concise style, which accounts for the inclusion of so many people, novels and reactions in a book of little over 200 pages. References and comparisons are explained and detailed for effective comprehension, and though informatively dense, the book feels whole and connected. I cannot help but add, however, that one need read Pamela in the Marketplace with a French dictionary at your side: a noticeable number of French passages and quotations are provided without translation. While I might have been able to overlook a few, the frequency of un-translated French sections not only impeded my understanding, but also imparted a sense of what I am sure was unintentional authorial superiority and condescension. The bulk of these passages made translation difficult, and with introductions that emphasize the importance and distinctness of the included French quotations, I was baffled at the lack of translation. (For example, see page 87.)
As a whole, Keymer and Sabor's Pamela in the Marketplace accomplishes its goal of setting the stage of the literary marketplace and diving into the reasons why Pamela made such a lasting mark in the field of literary criticism as an "early agent in the emergence of a critical public sphere" (48). Despite its unsettling structure of biographical and historical detours, the book is both an interesting and entertaining look at the nature of publication and the overwhelming responses, both positive and negative, that followed Richardson's 1740 publication of Pamela. I would recommend the book to fans of publication history and to those in search of a compilation of the literary offspring of Pamela. I would, however, warn those unfamiliar with Pamela and/or uninterested in satirical counterfictions to the novel not to expect Keymer and Sabor's book to satiate their desire for a close, critical reading of Pamela itself. | | | Write your own review about 'Pamela' in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland
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