Abstract
This chapter connects Sarah Fielding’s public defense of Clarissa, in her pamphlet “Remarks on Clarissa,” to her sense of authorship, friendship ideals, and narrative form. Fielding’s Adventures of David Simple (1744) and David Simple, Volume the Last (1753) evoke the notion of ‘reading as friendship” to engage ideas about literary property and the vexed, evolving question of to whom, finally, characters and their stories belong. I contend that, for Fielding, the rhetoric of friendship serves a conscious strategy for coming to terms with the ethical tensions generated by the commodification of literary property, the expanding power of readers, and the crystallization of divergent attitudes toward fictional characters.
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