{"id":2705,"date":"2014-05-27T09:50:23","date_gmt":"2014-05-27T09:50:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/?p=2705"},"modified":"2015-05-14T14:35:41","modified_gmt":"2015-05-14T13:35:41","slug":"james-fowler-publishes-on-samuel-richardson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/2014\/05\/27\/james-fowler-publishes-on-samuel-richardson\/","title":{"rendered":"James Fowler publishes on Samuel Richardson"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.kent.ac.uk\/secl\/french\/staff\/fowler.html\">Dr James Fowler<\/a>, Senior Lecturer in the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kent.ac.uk\/secl\/french\/index.html\">Department of French<\/a>, has recently published a new book on Samuel Richardson, entitled <em>Richardson and the Philosophes<\/em> (Legenda, 2014).<\/p>\n<p>In mid-eighteenth-century Europe, a taste for sentiment accompanied the \u2018rise of the novel\u2019, and the success of Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) played a vital role in this. James\u2019s new study is the first to compare the response of the most famous philosophes to the Richardson phenomenon. Voltaire, who claims to despise the novel, writes four \u2018Richardsonian\u2019 fictions; Diderot\u2019s fascination with the English author is expressed in <em>La Religieuse<\/em>, Rousseau\u2019s in <em>Julie<\/em> \u2014 the century\u2019s bestseller. Yet their responses to him remained ambivalent. On the one hand they admire Richardson\u2019s ability to make the reader weep. On the other, they champion a range of Enlightenment beliefs which he, an enthusiast of Milton, vehemently opposed. In death as in life, the English author exacerbates the philosophes\u2019 rivalry. The eulogy which Diderot writes in 1761 implicitly asks: who can write a new <em>Clarissa<\/em>? But also: whose social, philosophical or political ideas will triumph as a result?<\/p>\n<p>For more details, please see the publisher\u2019s page here:<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.legendabooks.com\/titles\/isbn\/9781909662117.html\">www.legendabooks.com\/titles\/isbn\/9781909662117.html<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dr James Fowler, Senior Lecturer in the Department of French, has recently published a new book on Samuel Richardson, entitled Richardson and the Philosophes (Legenda, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/2014\/05\/27\/james-fowler-publishes-on-samuel-richardson\/\">Read&nbsp;more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2458,"featured_media":2706,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[124],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2705"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2458"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2705"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2705\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2708,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2705\/revisions\/2708"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2706"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2705"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2705"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2705"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}