Why did eighteenth-century writers employ digression as a literary form of diversion, and how did their readers come to enjoy linguistic and textual devices that self-consciously disrupt the reading experience? Darryl P. Domingo answers these questions through an examination of the formative period in the commercialization of leisure in England, and the coincidental coming of age of literary self-consciousness in works published between approximately 1690 and 1760. During this period, commercial entertainers tested out new ways of gratifying a public increasingly eager for amusement, while professional writers explored the rhetorical possibilities of intrusion, obstruction, and interruption through their characteristic use of devices like digression. Such devices adopt similar forms and fulfil similar functions in literature as do diversions in culture: they 'unbend the mind' and reveal the complex reciprocity between commercialized leisure and commercial literature in the age of Swift, Pope, and Fielding.
Although Elias Brand contributes only one letter to the first edition of Clarissa , and three letters to the revised third edition of 1751, he is considered by Samuel Richardson important enough to include in his list of the “Principal Characters.” This article accounts for Brand’s complicated role by analyzing in detail the meaning of the forty-five quotations punctuating his letters, as well as the manner in which he quotes his tags and texts. Brand’s marshalling of spurious evidence against Clarissa and his habit of quoting authors as authorities suggests that the latter may be a key to the credibility of the former. Brand represents himself as a confirmed “Ancient,” but taking the pedant at his own word is dangerous because of the extent of his surprising debt to the British “Moderns” and to the seventeenth-century Oxford scholar and Anglo-Latin poet, John Owen. This article concludes that Brand’s letters are thematic and structurally integral to a novel that is, in many ways, about the consequences of right and wrong reading.
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