On the Modernism in Samuel Richardson's Clarissa

Samuel Richardson's masterpiece Clarissa, with the feature of the epistolary form, is no more an essentially social novel than Pamela. Richardson probes through the social, to the ethical, to the religious, and the final volumes are concerned with dying to the core. The epistolary form of this novel focuses attention on the experience of writing and creates an effect analogous to the kind of narrative polyphony defined by Mikhail Bakhtin. Richardson is doubtlessly the pioneer of "point of view" fiction, but he was fully aware of the flaw of the single-focus epistolary form and set out to create Clarissa, where he adopts a "multiple point of view" writing. So the modernism of Clarissa lies not only in its content, but also in its form.