DOCSLIB.ORG

Chapter 2 Henry Fielding: Joseph Andrews

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Chapter 2 Henry Fielding: Joseph Andrews Chapter 2 Henry Fielding: Joseph Andrews 2.1 The 18 th century British literature affords historians and students a vista of contrasts. Law ‘had come to replace religion as the main ideological cement of society’ 1, but lawyers were acerbically satirised. As the parliamentarians extended the death penalty to a myriad of misdemeanours, the literary legislators applied the weapons of satire to the vice and disorder around them. Injustices produced by law were a common subject for satire. The middle decades of the 18 th century saw a wave of anxiety about crime. Henry Fielding 2 (1707-54), who as a young man witnessed the hanging of Jonathan Wild at Tyburn in 1725, immersed himself uniquely in the literary and legal discourses on crime from the 1740s. Fielding led a life in successive phases, as a young man about town, as a playwright, a lawyer and a novelist. In 1749 he was appointed to the magistracy, and he devised the Bow Street Runners police force during his term in office. Though he may appear to us as a representative of the integrated culture of law and letters, it was only when Walpole’s Licensing Act of 1737 closed down the theatres that he enrolled in the Middle Temple, studied law and became a barrister. As a struggling advocate on the Western Circuit, he combined both professions. In early 1730s, Fielding wrote anonymous political satire and essays for journals such as The Champion , but in 1742, he published his first novel, 48 Joseph Andrews . Styling his book a ‘comic epic poem in prose’ Fielding attempted an accurate representation of the manners and morals of his society. Rather than direct condemnation, he sought to elicit ridicule of folly and vice by satire. He professes allegiance in this work to realist canons of portraiture, not to the caricaturist’s technique of exaggeration. Joseph Andrews tests the innocence of Joseph, Fanny and Parson Adams against the depredations of greedy publicans, uncharitable priests, cunning robbers and a host of self-serving ‘People of Fashion’ in a series of adventures on the road. Fielding established himself as a writer before he embarked on his legal studies, and he had achieved success in the novel before he became a magistrate. Nevertheless, issues related to crime and law underlay his entire career as an author, even in his earlier days as a dramatist and journalist. His mother’s father was a justice of the Queen’s Bench, while his paternal grand-father was an archdeacon of Salisbury; in these two men there may have been something of the genesis of Fielding’s bent toward the law and his firm sense of Christian morality. During 1728 to 1737, Fielding wrote over twenty comedies and burlesques. By that time, he was established as England’s leading playwright. In 1737, the Stage Licensing Act was passed by the Horace Walpole’s government which made dramatic performances open to government censorship 3. The Act effectively ended Fielding’s dramatic career. He turned to three alternative occupations which were to occupy him to the end of his life, and which interacted with each other in various ways: the law, political journalism 4 and novel-writing. He was called to the Bar in 1740, practising on the Western Circuit, and in 1748 became Justice of the Peace for Westminster, eventually extending his jurisdiction to the whole of Middlesex. He created the force which eventually became the Metropolitan 49 Police, and in his later years as a magistrate wrote a number of tracts on socio-legal issues. His judicial philosophy, as expressed in these, was relatively hard-line, but his novels, and especially Amelia (1751), show an angry awareness of the malpractices and injustices of the law and a compassionate feeling for its victims: the plight of good persons driven by poverty into petty crime and punished by corrupt and unfeeling magistrates is a recurrent preoccupation. A tension between the claims of strict justice, and those of a larger perspective on the whole human case, seems to have exercised Fielding throughout his legal and fiction-writing career. It is evident in the early Journey from this World to the Next (1743) as well as in Tom Jones (1749). Years surrounding the publication of Joseph Andrews were hard ones for Fielding. 5 Moreover, as a result of his literary and political notoriety, it was difficult for Fielding to get ahead in the legal profession. Yet if Fielding could not get money by practicing law, he did use the subject of law in his writing: Jonathan Wild (1743) is filled with biting accounts of the grotesque malpractices in the system of criminal law. Criminal justice in London In the early Hanoverian age it was widely thought that crime had reached a new pitch of intensity: people in most ages have felt the same. Yet there were rational grounds for believing that social unrest posed an increasing threat, especially in the capital. Even if the crime waves Fielding wrote about were in some measure a matter of perception rather than objective reality (the statistics do not show a simple graph of upward progression), there was enough reality in them to warrant serious concern. For one thing, a polite and commercial nation could no longer endure some of the blatant evils which had gone on more or less unchecked in earlier 50 centuries. For another, demographic changes had outrun the administrative capacity of a system based on medieval and Tudor institutions. Thirdly, sheer growth meant that the law encountered a different scale, if not always a different kind, of problems in its operations. According to Pat Rogers 6 some historians have interpreted the entire system as a ruling-class conspiracy masquerading as a genuine operation of criminal justice. He further says that the view has not been accepted by the majority of scholars, who have pointed to the checks and balances by which some of the rigours of the law could be mitigated, and by which the court- room could provide a relatively level playing-field, granted the inequalities which prevailed outside the compass of law in the wider society. Fuller investigation of the day-to-day workings of legal institutions has shown that the system contained many fair-minded and hard-working people, who attempted to carry out their duties honourably in the face of huge social problems presented by the new urbanized environment. Pat Rogers further states that Justice Thrasher in Amelia displays no such urge to deal equitably with the men and women who come before him, and he was not alone in this. But in his magisterial capacity Fielding himself met the best standards of the time, even if his conduct does not stand up to meticulous scrutiny on every occasion, and his judicial philosophy lagged behind the most advanced thinking of the Enlightenment. Seated in his house on the west side of Bow Street, Fielding did not have to look far to see the evidence of what was going on. When first appointed to the magistracy, he had briefly taken a house in the neighbourhood, at Brownlow Street, off Drury Lane. From this site he could have taken a five-minute stroll and assembled a hundred career criminals, if they had been willing to show themselves. Close by squatted the fearsome ‘rookeries’ of St. Giles, a byword for poverty, disease, and crime for another 51 century, and a model for the slum Tom-all-alone’s which Dickens later created in Bleak House . Legal and Social Works – Soon after Henry Fielding’s appointments to the magistracy in 1748 (for Westminster) and 1749 (for Middlesex County), he was elected chairman of the Westminster Sessions and in that capacity addressed the grand jury in 1749 – A Charge delivered to the Grand Jury . It is the first of his several important works where he exhorts the members of the jury strictly to enforce the laws against public immorality. As soon as Fielding was appointed to the magistracy, he naturally took a central role in the national discourse regarding legal and social affairs. The area of his responsibility covered some of the most notorious blackspots in the entire country, with a thriving criminal subculture and a pattern of unrest marked by frequent riots. In addition, Fielding did more than serve as a proactive Justice of the Peace in the capital. He wrote widely on matters of public policy, as they were affected by the law and by the institutions which supported its implementation: pamphlets, charges to the jury, and articles in the press flowed from his pen during the brief tenure of his magistracy. Of course, his novels deal centrally with some of the same issues, as they had done from the start. Equally, his comic masterpiece, Jonathan Wild , touches (albeit with satiric obliquity) on authentic issues regarding crime in London. Most of Fielding’s pronouncements relate to topical circumstances, such as an apparent wave of violent robberies, a riot in the streets, or a controversial ‘missing persons’ case. However, the cast of mind underlying the writing of these works is philosophic as well as pragmatic. While Fielding was a practical reformer and active participant in day-to-day controversial discourse, he was also a deeply reflective man, with a fuller 52 knowledge of humane learning – history, literature ancient and modern, and political theory – than almost all of his colleagues on the bench. Even if he had never written his plays or his fiction, his remaining oeuvre would still interest students of early Hanoverian England, because it discusses the controversies of the time through the prism of a thoughtful attitude towards society and a well-stocked mind.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Henry Fielding Joseph Andrews
    HENRY FIELDING JOSEPH ANDREWS VOLUME I 2008 – All rights reserved Non commercial use permitted THE WORKS OF HENRY FIELDING EDITED BY GEORGE SAINTSBURY IN TWELVE VOLUMES VOL. I. JOSEPH ANDREWS VOL. I. CONTENTS. INTRODUCTION. PREFACE. BOOK I. CHAPTER I. _Of writing lives in general, and particularly of Pamela, with a word by the bye of Colley Cibber and others_ CHAPTER II. _Of Mr Joseph Andrews, his birth, parentage, education, and great endowments, with a word or two concerning ancestors_ CHAPTER III. _Of Mr Abraham Adams the curate, Mrs Slipslop the chambermaid, and others_ CHAPTER IV. _What happened after their journey to London_ CHAPTER V. _The death of Sir Thomas Booby, with the affectionate and mournful behaviour of his widow, and the great purity of Joseph Andrews_ CHAPTER VI. _How Joseph Andrews writ a letter to his sister Pamela_ CHAPTER VII. _Sayings of wise men. A dialogue between the lady and her maid; and a panegyric, or rather satire, on the passion of love, in the sublime style_ CHAPTER VIII. _In which, after some very fine writing, the history goes on, and relates the interview between the lady and Joseph; where the latter hath set an example which we despair of seeing followed by his sex in this vicious age_ CHAPTER IX. _What passed between the lady and Mrs Slipslop; in which we prophesy there are some strokes which every one will not truly comprehend at the first reading_ CHAPTER X. _Joseph writes another letter; his transactions with Mr Peter Pounce, &c., with his departure from Lady Booby_ CHAPTER XI. _Of several new matters not expected_ CHAPTER XII.
    [Show full text]
  • Henry Fielding's Comic Epic in Prose: a Study of Joseph Andrews in the Light
    International Journal of Academic Research and Development International Journal of Academic Research and Development ISSN: 2455-4197 Impact Factor: RJIF 5.22 www.academicsjournal.com Volume 3; Issue 1; January 2018; Page No. 904-906 Henry fielding’s comic epic in prose: A study of Joseph Andrews in the light of this genre Swati Suri Assistant Professor, Shri Guru Gobind Singh College, Chandigarh, Punjab, India Abstract The eighteenth century--"our excellent and indispensable eighteenth century"-is known in the history of English literature particularly for the birth and development of the novel. In this century the novel threw into insignificance all other literary forms and became the dominant form to continue as such for hundreds of years. The pioneers of the novel were Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne. The work of this foursome is of monumental significance, particularly because they were not only our first novelists but some of our best. "Joseph Andrews" published in 1742 is Fielding's first novel. It is a classical example of a literary work which started as a parody and ended as an excellent work of art in its own right. The work Fielding intended to parody was Richardson's first novel Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded which had taken England by storm in the years following 1740 when it was first published. Fielding was aware of giving a new literary form with Joseph Andrews which he called "a comic epic in prose." The present paper will analyze the novel Joseph Andrews in the light of this new genre. Keywords: comedy, burlesque, parody, realism, prose Introduction “Fielding started with the intention of writing a burlesque of Henry Fielding is regarded as one of the greatest writers Pamela but as the work progressed, it became the pioneer of a among English novelists of the Eighteenth century and was new type of novel.” determinant in the emergence of the novel as a respected Fielding thought he had hit upon a new genre of literature and literary form.
    [Show full text]
  • Thesis-1969-P769l.Pdf
    THE IMPORTANCE OF THE BURLESQUE ASPECTS OF JOSEPH.ANDREWS, A NOVEL BY HENRY FIELDING By ANNA COLLEEN POLK Bachelor of Arts Northeastern State College Tahlequah, Oklahoma 1964 Submitted to the Faculty ot the Graduate College of the Oklahoma State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS May, 1969 __ j OKLAHOMA STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 8iP 291969 THE IMPORTANCE OF THE BURLESQUE ASPECTS OF JOSEPH ANDREWS, A NOVEL BY HENRY FIELDING Thesis Approved: ~~ £~ 1{,· if'~ Jr-- Dean of the Graduate College 725038 ii PREFACE This thesis explores the·impottance of the burlesque aspects of Joseph Andrews, a novel by Henry Fielding· published in 1742. The· Preface. of.· the novel set forth a comic. theory which was entirely English and-which Fielding describes as a·11kind of writing, which l do not remember-· to have seen· hitherto attempted in our language". (xvii) •1 . The purpose of this paper will be to d.iscuss. the influence o:f; the burlesque .in formulating the new-genre which Fielding implies is the cow,:l..c equivalent of the epic. Now, .·a· comic· romance is a comic epic poem in prose 4iffering from comedy, as the--·serious epic from tragedy its action· being· more extended ·and· c'omp:rehensive; con­ tainiµg ·a ·much larger circle of·incidents, and intro­ ducing a greater ·variety of characters~ - lt differs :f;rO'J;l;l the serious romance in its fable and action,. in· this; that as in the one·these are·grave and solemn, ~o iil the other they·are·light:and:ridiculous: it• differs in its characters by introducing persons of.
    [Show full text]
  • Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews As a Picaresque
    HENRY FIELDING’S JOSEPH ANDREWS AS A PICARESQUE NOVEL DR. MANISH D. BHATT Assistant Professor, Department of English, Vijaynagar Arts College, Vijaynagar - 383460 Dist. S. K. (GJ) INDIA Henry Fielding was born at Sharpham Park in the vicinity of Glastonbury in 1707.It was Sir Gould’s countryside estate. The novelist was the eldest son of Sarah and Edmund. He passed some of his time with Lady Gould, his grandmother. There he developed a taste for law and read something of literature. Fielding died in October, 1754. Before that he was gripped by gout. In 1753 his health showed a considerable deterioration. It became exceedingly difficult for him to perform his magisterial duties. Since the climate of England did not suit him, it was suggested that he should seek a ‘milder climate’. He left the country for Lisbon in Portugal and expired there. The general impression that we gather from his life shows that his career had been that of a protracted struggle. The parental affluence left him in lurch. The political fight undertaken by him was constant and vigorous. His literary understanding was of a kind which not only created a stir in that century, but blazed the trail of light followed by writers of the subsequent periods, a force which pierced through a history of novel writing which came in his wake and after. INTRODUCTION Fielding is regarded as one of the most well-known novelist of 18th century. Joseph Andrews was the first novel written by him. It was published in 1742 as a parody of Samuel DR.
    [Show full text]
  • Justice Fielding, the Novel, and the Law
    Justice Fielding, the Novel, and the Law Martin C. Battestin with Ruthe R. Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life. Routledge, Chapman & Hall (1990). 738 pp. $45.00. AHen D. Boyer For as I am, in reality, the founder of a new province of writing, so I am at liberty to make what laws I please therein. - Henry Fielding Henry Fielding, who wrote the English language's first good comic novels, was the man who founded England's first modem police force. This understanding lies at the heart of Henry Fielding: A Life, by Martin Battestin, and it matters far more than many better-known connections between law and literature: that Scott was a lawyer, that Kafka was a lawyer, that Dickens was a solicitor's clerk, that Melville spent his work- ing life surrounded by judges. The most revealing passage in Fielding's novels comes near the end of Joseph Andrews. Joseph, his betrothed Fanny, and Parson Abraham Andrews have undergone a particularly harrowing journey across the English countryside-mistaken for robbers, set upon by robbers, cursed at by innkeepers, scorned by parsons. Fanny, at last, is kidnapped, car- ried off by a crooked old soldier, one of the local squire's henchmen. They meet one traveler; Fanny cries out that she is about to be raped; the captain explains that he is carrying home his runaway wife. But then they meet two outriders for a coach: [T]he captain abused her violently for breaking his commands, and threaten'd to gagg her; when two more horsemen, armed with pis- tols, came into the road just before them.
    [Show full text]
  • Prudes, Lusciousness and Joseph Andrews
    SYDNEY STUDIES Prudes, Lusciousness and Joseph Andrews MICHAEL ORANGE It is not surprising that in selecting one kind of writing about sexuality as the occasion for his own counter-narratives Fielding created intractable difficulties for himself. Parody demands likeness, as the relationship between Richardson's novel Pamela and his own Shamela shows, and even the measure ofliberation from parody that Joseph Andrews provides turns out to be minimal when desire and its deferment are engaged. TIle parodic nature of Fielding's project in his earliest novels almost guarantees that they will subvert themselves because of his commitment to exploring sexuality. Like Richardson he was a product of his own times and his writing is therefore partly determined by (as well as helping to define) eighteenth-century notions of sexuality, which can seem peculiarly alien to readers today. And these difficulties are compounded by the nature of prose fiction itself, to Fielding literally novel. He saw himself as an experimenter within a new form. Perhaps historically he was hardly in a position to realize that while protesting vigorously about voyeurism he had committed him~elf to an intensely voyeuristic medium. The parodic Shamela overcomes voyeurism by robustly converting it into an opportunity for comedy. Fielding found his distinctive voice as a novelist from the beginning, as though his forced retirement from playwriting1 made him value the novel as a form precisely because it gave him a direct presence as narrator not possible to him in the theatre, while still allowing theatrical presentations of a variety of selves. One ofthose personae used to be equated with Fielding himself, with common sense, robustness, heartiness and so forth2 (less easy since the 1 See Martin C.
    [Show full text]
  • Copyrighted Material
    1 The 1740s Patricia Meyer Spacks Exuberance marked British literary production in the 1740s. In prose and in poetry, the decade saw a vivid explosion of energy. Poetry ranged from Samuel Johnson’s ­passionate Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), composed in heroic couplets and imi- tating a classical model, to William Collins’s Odes (1747), innovative in form and content; from Alexander Pope’s Dunciad (1743), a satiric anti-epic in couplets, to the final ­version of James Thomson’s The Seasons (1744), a long blank verse poem with a ­rhapsodic view of the natural world. Prose fiction included moralized fable, social satire, imitation biography and autobiography, sentimental investigation, action narrative, erotic exploration, and various combinations. The many important pub- lished novels did not necessarily have much in common. Clarissa (1747–1748) bears little obvious resemblance to Roderick Random (1748). Eliza Haywood’s Anti‐Pamela (1741) and Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742) share almost nothing beyond their common satirical target of Pamela (1740). The efflorescence of fiction implied only a few widely held assumptions about what the novel is, does, or should do. Most of its manifestations, however, suggested a conviction that fiction, providing vicar- ious experience for its readers, should dramatize for them human experience in its common forms. That rather obvious project carried significant weight in the 1740s. The notion that experience provides theCOPYRIGHTED only secure basis for knowledge MATERIAL was at the heart of philosophic empiricism, strongly articulated by the philosopher David Hume, whose Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740) insisted that we must content ourselves with experience as the stuff of knowledge and that experience provides sufficient basis for the conduct A Companion to the English Novel, First Edition.
    [Show full text]
  • Errors and Reconciliations: Marriage in the Plays and Early Novels of Henry Fielding
    ERRORS AND RECONCILIATIONS: MARRIAGE IN THE PLAYS AND EARLY NOVELS OF HENRY FIELDING ANACLARA CASTRO SANTANA SUBMITTED FOR THE DEGREE OF PHD THE UNIVERSITY OF YORK ENGLISH AND RELATED LITERATURE SEPTEMBER 2013 ABSTRACT This thesis explores Henry Fielding’s fascination with marriage, and the importance of the marriage plot in his plays and early novels. Its main argument is twofold: it contends that Fielding presents marriage as symptomatic of moral and social evils on the one hand, and as a powerful source of moral improvement on the other. It also argues that the author imported and adapted the theatrical marriage plot—a key diegetic structure of stage comedies of the early eighteenth century—into his prose fictions. Following the hypothesis that this was his favourite narrative vehicle, as it proffered harmony between form and content, the thesis illustrates the ways in which Fielding transposed some of the well-established dramatic conventions of the marriage plot into the novel, a genre that was gaining in cultural status at the time. The Introduction provides background information for the study of marriage in Fielding’s work, offering a brief historical contextualization of marital laws and practices before the Marriage Act of 1753. Section One presents close readings of ten representative plays, investigating the writer’s first discovery of the theatrical marriage plot, and the ways in which he appropriated and experimented with it. The four chapters that compose the second part of the thesis trace the interrelated development of the marriage plot and theatrical motifs in Fielding’s early novels, namely Shamela (1741), Joseph Andrews (1742), Jonathan Wild (1743), and The Female Husband (1746).
    [Show full text]
  • Una-Theses-0312.Pdf
    HEN R Y FIE L DIN G THE 0 R Y o F THE COM I C A thesis submitted to the faculty of the GRADUATE SChOOL of the UNIV~RSITY of - INN~SOTA by DAGMAR DONEGHY • In partial fulfillment of the requirements for ~he degree of Master of Arts . June 1916. RltPORT of Committee on Thesis The undersigned, acting as a Committee of the Graduate School, have r ead the accompanying thesis submttted by SD.~ ..~ . .!! . .~.~ .... ~ for the degree of .~. .~ .. ...... ~.. ..~ ...................... ............ They approve it as a thesis meeting tho require- menta of the Grad ate School of t h e Un iv@raity of :Minnesota, and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the r e quirements for the degree of .~~ ...a. .. ~....... ..... ......... ....- .. .............. -.................... .-:.::d.@. _.. -.. -~........ ..... -....... -.... --~-.. ' _.... -_ ...... - ....- ..• _- ..... __ .-........_ ... _.. _.... .... _..... ........ __ ._ .. __ .............. __ ._ .. _.... _.......... _._ ...... _..... _.- BIB L lOG RAP H Y. Henry Fi elding : Love i n Several 4asgues. London, ~n ith ~ lder & co., 1882. Th e l' empl e Heau. London, Smith Elder & Co. 1882. The Justice Caught in his Own Trap. London, Smith Elder & Co., 1882. The ~odern Husband. London, ~mith Elder a co ., 1 882. ~~ he Debauch ees. London, Smith Elder & Co., 1882. Don Quixote in England . London, Smith Elder & Co., 1882. 'rhe Universal Gallan t. London, Smi th Elder ?r. Co., 1882. The 'I/ edci ing Day . London , :::;w i th .l!; l de r c~ Co., 1882. The Good-Natured Man . London. Smith Elder & Co., 1882. The Letter "lri ters or A New Way to Keep a 1/ife at Home , London, ~n ith ~ lder & co., 1882.
    [Show full text]
  • Fielding's Essay on Conversation: a Courtesy Guide to Joseph Andrews ?
    TTMMCLOUGHLIN FIELDING'S ESSAY ON CONVERSATION: A COURTESY GUIDE TO JOSEPH ANDREWS ? What prompted this research was the realisation that Fielding was working on both the Essay on Conversation and Joseph Andrews at the same time. During those few difficult months at the end of 1741, "laid up in the Gout, with a favourite Child dying in one Bed, and my Wife in a Condition very little better, on another," these two projects were going forward.1 Much ink has been spent on the genesis of Joseph Andrews, but little attention has been given to the coincidence that he was working on a standard conduct-book, the Essay on Conversation, while also writing his first novel. It is interesting to recall that Richardson's Pamela, published in 1741, also had close ties with a projected conduct-book, his Familiar Letters (1741) written "to instruct handsome Girls, who were obliged to go out to Service... how to avoid the Snares that might be laid against their Virtue."2 This case together with that of Fielding points to 1740-41 as a moment in English literature when two major fiction writers realised in different ways that the moral purpose of the conduct-book might be more pleasantly and extensively served by the novel. The basic question therefore which this paper seeks to answer is what connection, if any, is there between the Essay and Joseph Andrews or, in another form, is Joseph Andrews an alternative way of writing the Essay, a kind of conduct novel ?3 In order to answer such questions it is important first to recall the main features of Fielding's Essay.
    [Show full text]
  • Class Conflict in Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews
    AWEJ for Translation & Literary Studies, Volume 4, Number3. August 2020 Pp.74 -86 . DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.24093/awejtls/vol4no3.6 Class Conflict in Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews Bechir Saoudi English Department, College of Science and Humanities, Hotat Bani Tamim, Prince Sattam Bin AbdulAziz University, Al-Kharj, Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Danah Al-Dhafyan English Department, College of Science and Humanities, Hotat Bani Tamim, Prince Sattam Bin AbdulAziz University, Al-Kharj, Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Ghayda Al-Tamimi English Department, College of Science and Humanities, Hotat Bani Tamim, Prince Sattam Bin AbdulAziz University, Al-Kharj, Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Khouloud Al-Tamimi English Department, College of Science and Humanities, Hotat Bani Tamim, Prince Sattam Bin AbdulAziz University, Al-Kharj, Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Nouf Al-Shaman English Department, College of Science and Humanities, Hotat Bani Tamim, Prince Sattam Bin AbdulAziz University, Al-Kharj, Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Raghad Al-Aqili English Department, College of Science and Humanities, Hotat Bani Tamim, Prince Sattam Bin AbdulAziz University, Al-Kharj, Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Wasmiyya Al-Ajmi English Department, College of Science and Humanities, Hotat Bani Tamim, Prince Sattam Bin AbdulAziz University, Al-Kharj, Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Abstract The basis of this paper is a research project that studies the struggle between classes in Henry Fielding's novel Joseph Andrews. It has been carried out during the second semester of the academic year 2019-2020 at the College of Science and Humanities, Hotat Bani Tamim, Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University, Al-Kharj, Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
    [Show full text]
  • Ian Watt, the Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Chatto & Windus 1957; Rep
    Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Chatto & Windus 1957; rep. Univ. of California Press 1957). Note: this copy has been made from a PDF version of the 1957 California UP edition. The foot-notes in that edition have been transposed to end-notes here and the page-numbers have been omitted. CHAPTER VIII: Fielding and the Epic Theory of the Novel SINCE it was Pamela that supplied the initial impetus for the writing of Joseph Andrews, Fielding cannot be considered as having made quite so direct a contribution as Richardson to the rise of the novel, and he is therefore given somewhat less extensive treatment here. His works in any case raise very different problems, since their distinguishing elements have their roots not so much in social change as in the neo-classical literary tradition. This in itself may be regarded as presenting something of a challenge to the basic argument of the present study: if the main features of Tom Jones, for example, were in fact the result of an independent and autonomous development within the Augustan world of letters, and if these features later became typical of the novel in general, it is evident that the crucial importance attributed above to the role of social change in bringing about the rise of the new form could hardly be sustained. Fielding’s celebrated formula of ‘the comic epic in prose’ undoubtedly lends some authority to the view that, far from being the unique literary expression of modern society, the novel is essentially a continuation of a very old and honoured narrative tradition.
    [Show full text]