Richardson and the Philosophes

In mid-eighteenth-century Europe, a taste for sentiment accompanied the ''rise of the novel'', and the success of Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) played a vital role in this. James Fowler''s new study is the first to compare the response of the most famous philosophes to the Richardson phenomenon. Voltaire, who claims to despise the novel, writes four ''Richardsonian'' fictions; Diderot''s fascinati...