Pamela, Shamela, and the Politics of the Pamela Vogue
There are Swarms of Moral Romances. One, of late Date, divided the World into such opposite Judgments, that some extolled it to the Stars, whilst others treated it with Contempt. Whence arose, particularly among the Ladies, two different Parties, Pamelists and Antiparnelists. ... Some look upon this young Virgin as an Example for Ladies to follow; nay, there have been those, who did not scruple to recommend this Romance from the Pulpit. Others, on the contrary, discover in it, the Behaviour of an hypocritical, crafty Girl, in her Courtship; who understands the Art of bringing a Man to her Lure.'
Sham Marriages and Proper Plots: Henry Fielding's Shamela and Joseph Andrews
This essay explores Henry Fielding's development of the marriage plot in Shamela (1741) and Joseph Andrews (1742). Surveying theatrical echoes in these works, which are particularly apparent in their marriage plots, I make the case that Fielding's first two novels are clearly indebted to his former career as a dramatist in the London stage of the late 1720s and early 1730s. I argue that, in writing Shamela and Joseph Andrews, Fielding was responding to Samuel Richardson's Pamela in a way that corresponded to how his plays were reactions to other popular theatrical entertainments of his time. This complicates the conventional critical view that it was Richardson's first novel, with its outstanding popularity, which drove Fielding to propose a radically opposite model for fiction writing.
Between Marx and Freud: The Authority of the Commonplace in Cultural Criticism Today@@@Lionel Trilling and the Fate of Cultural Criticism@@@The Servant's Hand: English Fiction from below
A work of innovative literary and cultural history, The Servant's Hand examines the representation of servants in nineteenth-century British fiction. Wandering in the margins of these texts that are not about them, servants are visible only as anachronistic appendages to their masters and as functions of traditional narrative form. Yet their persistence, Robbins argues, signals more than the absence of the "ordinary people" they are taken to represent. Robbins's argument offers a new and distinctive approach to the literary analysis of class, while it also bodies forth a revisionist counterpolitics to the realist tradition from Homer to Virginia Woolf. Originally published in 1986 (Columbia University Press), The Servant's Hand is appearing for the first time in paperback.