Samuel Richardson; dramatic novelist

"With common sense and authority, Mr. Kinkead-Weeks interprets the novels of Samuel Richardson, maintaining that they are far more artful and complex than has been properly acknowledged. He analyzes Richardson's attempts to create dramatic experience in the present tense or "to the moment," and shows how novelist's imagination worked. "Richardson places his characters in a situation of conflict," the author writes, "and the fiction grows, not through complicated plotting and design, but as a result of his imagining how those characters will react of his moment and so create the next, and the next. In the first three sections of the book, Mr. Kinkead-Weekes offers close readings of the novels- Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles nature of Richardson's dramatic art. In the final section he explores the implications of this art and marshals evidence that Richardson was conscious of what he was doing. The author convincingly sets forth the reasons underlying his regard for Richardson, and his study should make more accessible to today's reader the work of one of the pioneers of English fiction" - Publisher.