Worldbuilding in Clarissa

Abstract: "Worldbuilding" tends to be understood as the process of inventing overtly fictive environments through exposition. But we may give it a narratological definition based on its central function: its production of a sense of background that extends beyond what the plot shows. Under this definition, we may find that the best place to begin a genealogy of "worldbuilding" is the eighteenth-century realist novel. This essay looks at how Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (1748) undertakes an early version of worldbuilding without exposition or exuberant fictionality. Drawing upon linguistics and philosophy, the essay traces three ways it does so: (1) implication, (2) deictics, and (3) grammatically non-dominant details.