This is a brief review of the critical article: Pamela, Shamela, and the Politics of the Pamela Vogue by Richard Gooding. one must read article and answer questions below Contextualizing your article – Identify the critic and the piece. 1) When and where was this piece published? 2) Is it a journal article, an anthologized essay, or a book chapter? What does the publication format tell you about the article’s method and scope? How does the article seem to contribute to the argument or project of the publication in which it appears? 3) Research the critic’s other scholarly work. What other eighteenth-century authors or subjects does this critic write about? How does this article seem to contribute to the critic’s greater intellectual project? Describing and analyzing your article – Using the following questions as prompts, try to summarize and evaluate the critic’s argument. Your answers should be about 2-3 sentences long, and you should include page numbers for any quotations that you include or ideas that you paraphrase. 1) What is this critic’s thesis? 2) What’s at stake? Why does this critic think it’s important to talk about this issue? In other words, what does this critic suggest the field of eighteenth-century studies will gain through this research? 3) What is this critic’s method? How does this critic approach and use primary texts (or eighteenth-century texts) to support their argument? 4) What other kinds of evidence does this critic use? If they use historical (or non-literary) sources, what does this evidence add to our knowledge of the literary text? Evaluating your article – How useful (or convincing) did you find this article? Using the following questions as prompts, try to imagine how you could ‘test’ this critic’s argument, either against a different part of the primary text mentioned in the original article, or against another course text: (course texts: •Defoe, Moll Flanders, (ed. Starr, Oxford World’s Classics)• Richardson, Pamela (ed. Keymer and Wakely, Oxford World’s Classics)• Fielding, Joseph Andrews and Shamela) 1) Is there anything that this approach cannot account for, or anything that it ignores or obscures? Are there other aspects of any of the eighteenth-century texts that we’ve read so far that might resist this reading? 2) How could you use this reading to interpret a different course text in a new way? Are there other aspects of any of the eighteenth-century texts that we’ve read so far that might support this critic’s reading? 3) What new interpretative problems does this approach help you to see? Now that you’ve read this article, is there a specific issue or question that you’d like to continue to research? Identifying your next steps – How could you present an alternative reading of the texts or issues addressed here? Using the following questions as prompts, identify 2-3 questions for further research. 1) Looking forward, what other questions would you need to ask of a new primary text in order to push your thinking on this subject further? 2) Looking back, how has your critical review helped you to think differently about the eighteenth-century literature that you have read so far? What questions should a new reader consider to experience the same revelation?
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