Richardson and the Philosophes, Hardcover by Fowler, James, ISBN 1909662119, ISBN-13 9781909662117, Brand New, Free shipping in the US In mid-eighteenth-century Europe, a taste for sentiment accompanied the ‘rise of the novel’, and the success of Samuel Richardson (1) 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.