Influences

Abstract

Prose fiction had enjoyed quite a long history in England, and a much longer one in Europe, before Fielding’s day. The origins of what we now call novels are Italian. Freely translated into English during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these novella storia (i.e. new stories) are lively, ingenious and often vulgar tales, so that the title novel came to be associated with bawdy, disreputable work. Fielding only employs it once, dismissively. On the other hand romance (from the French roman) ,which he prefers, had by the mid-eighteenth century, acquired overtones of wild implausibility and high-flown sentiment. Indeed, Fielding speaks disparagingly in The Author’s Preface of ‘those voluminous works called romances [which contain] very little instruction or entertainment.’