Abstract
Fielding’s prose production, like Richardson’s, could also be said to form a parabola, even if its shape is neither quite as symmetrical or as simple to trace as that inscribed by his great rival. Formally and ideologically, however, the two curves may be broadly characterized as inversions of each other, as the following brief comparison suggests.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
The most significant monographs on him are generally, therefore, from earlier decades and include Robert Alter, Fielding and the Nature of the Novel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968);
J. Paul Hunter, Occasional Form: Henry Fielding and the Chains of Circumstance (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975);
Claude Rawson, Henry Fielding and the Augustan Ideal under Stress (London: Routledge, 1972).
More recent and particularly relevant to this study are: Jill Campbell, Natural Masques: Gender and Identity in Fielding’s Plays and Novels (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995);
Angela J. Smallwood, Fielding and the Woman Question: The Novels of Henry Fielding and the Feminist Debate, 1700–1750 (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989).
Apart from Martin Battestin’s definitive Henry Fielding: A Life (London: Routledge, 1989), some of the most useful recent work is in separate sections of comparative studies of eighteenth-century fiction; several of these were discussed in Chapter 2.
The way in which Fielding (and Richardson) also consciously belittled and displaced another fictional tradition, namely the amatory fiction of Behn, Manley and Haywood, is convincingly argued by William Warner in his essay ‘The Elevation of the Novel in England: Hegemony and Literary History’, in The English Novel, 1700 to Fielding, ed. Richard Kroll (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1998), pp. 49–69.
See the extended discussion in E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel (1927; Pelican Books, 1962), pp. 75–85.
Ideas first formulated in Martin Battestin, The Moral Basis ofFielding’s Art: A Study of Joseph Andrews (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1959).
These were first noted by R. S. Crane in his essay ‘The Concept of Plot and the Plot of Tom Jones’, in Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern, ed. R. S. Crane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952).
Parallels between legitimizing a new fictional form and establishing a new monetary stability are the subject of James Thompson’s fascinating study, Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel (London: Duke University Press, 1996).
Sarch Fielding, The Adventures of David Simple, ed. Malcolm Kelsall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 6.
Copyright information
© 2001 John Skinner
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Skinner, J. (2001). Two Literary Parabolas (ii): Fielding from Jonathan Wild to Amelia. In: An Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Fiction. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-62946-2_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-62946-2_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-77625-4
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-62946-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)