This is the description in the introduction to the volume:
Ula Klein’s chapter centers on a reading of Samuel Richardson’s 1740 novel Pamela in an undergraduate special topics course, “Desire and Transgression in the Eighteenth Century,” that uses adaptation to highlight not only the cultural relevance of eighteenth-century texts, but also to incorporate feminist and queer literary theories into the classroom. Klein’s students proposed that Pamela seemed to them to be “the eighteenth-century version of the popular sensation [E. L. James’s] Fifty Shades of Grey.” More specifically, they connected the sadomasochistic aspects of the first half of Pamela to the contemporary erotic novels of E. L. James. Klein describes how a comparison of those texts can be valuably contextualized by discussion of how both works reflect the themes of classic fairy tales such as Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast, and by discussion of the Romantic archetype of the Byronic hero. The chapter discusses the pedagogical value of reading patterns of plot and character as a way to see how desire and transgression have been adapted and appropriated across a number of years and genres. (15-16)
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class discussions that incorporated both texts helped students understand the popular appeal of Pamela, its mixed reaction at the time, its role in the larger context of novel studies, as well as the problematic repetition of certain cultural fantasies that remain largely unchanged over the last 250 years. (159)
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Both Richardson’s and James’s novels are told from the first-person perspective of a young woman who is only just beginning to enter the adult world, who has never been in love before, and who finds herself violently courted by a much wealthier, more powerful man of consequence. Pamela and Anastasia Steele both virtuously resist the advances of Mr. B and Christian Grey respectively, and both novels present their heroines as ultimately able to reform their rakish admirers into respectable husbands. In large part the novels attribute the success of these young women and their ability to move up the social ladder through propitious, financially advantageous marriages to the heroines’ innocence, naiveté, feminine virtue, and strong-willed sense of independence. Despite differences in style, characterization, time period, and, of course, erotic descriptions, both Pamela and Fifty Shades of Grey share themes and plot points that have their roots in cultural myths and archetypes that are carried through time in other literary works of the nineteenth century. These cultural myths and archetypes, in turn, make up the burgeoning genre of romance fiction. (162)
This is the description in the introduction to the volume:
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