Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Wilde, Lisa

Titel

Refiguring Clarissa in Godwin's Caleb Williams.(William Godwin)

Ist Teil von

• Papers on language & literature, 2017-12, Vol.53 (1), p.55-55

Ort / Verlag

Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University

Erscheinungsjahr

2017

Quelle

Literature Online (LION eBooks)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• William Godwin writes exceptionally clear prose, but few eighteenth-century novels have proved so difficult to read as his masterpiece Things as They Are; Or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams. An early experiment in psychological fiction by a noted political philosopher, the work, upon its publication in 1794, generated a body of critical responses whose sheer heterogeneity suggests that contemporary reviewers were unsure of how the novel should be taken. Modern readings of Caleb Williams, as Monika Fludernik points out, tend to divide into either political interpretations which try to reveal the arguments of Political Justice in the novel or analyses that focus on Caleb's psychology, his narrative unreliability, and his relationship to Falkland. As Marilyn Butler points out, however, such readings necessarily minimize both Godwin's radical politics and the historical topicality of his novel-a topicality the author himself emphasized at the time of the work's publication.