"Lie thee down, oddity!": Plot and Its Resistance in the Richardsonian Novel

Abstract: For the eighteenth-century novel, to be "interesting" was a problem. Influenced by a cultural discourse that invested art with an imperative to suppress the dangers of excessive passion, some novelists and critics suggested that novels could achieve this by presenting exemplary characters within immersive plots that held readerly attention more effectively than non-narrative genres. At the same time, they took seriously the counterclaim that thrilling narratives obstructed readers' absorption of the salutary moral messages promoted by characters. I propose that novelists including Samuel Richardson, Ann Radcliffe, and Charlotte Smith innovated formal techniques that sought to neutralize the perceived dangers of plot in order to cultivate calm and reflective readerly dispositions.