Samuel Richardson and the Dramatic Novel

Download or read book Samuel Richardson and the Dramatic Novel written by Ira Konigsberg and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-07-15 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Samuel Richardson, the founder of the modern English novel, gave shape to a previously unformed literary genre. Instrumental in the development of this new art form, Ira Konigsberg contends, is the influence of the drama. Although scholars have long suspected the influence of drama on Richardson's writing, this is the first study to examine it in detail. In such matters as material, technique, and structure, Konigsberg seeks to show that Richardson found his precedents in Restoration and early eighteenth-century drama and that it was his integration of these dramatic elements with fiction which caused the mutation in genre that is responsible for the subsequent course of the English novel.