“They blush because they understand” : la rhétorique de la rougeur dans les romans de Samuel Richardson

Abstract

At the crossroads of internal and external communication, blushing is a literary process through which Samuel Richardson’s fiction conveys meaning. The author of Clarissa uses this phenomenon, part of diegetic non verbal communication, in a systematic manner to guide the reader through his/her hermeneutic process. The analysis of the whole of Richardson’s literary production reveals that far from being a mere technique of illusion, blushing speaks and is part of a rhetoric.

Keywords

• blush
• blushing
• epistolary novel
• communication