This volume features two of Fielding's classic works as well as all other pieces not found in the 12 previous volumes of the nondramatic writings. Also included are writings attributed to Fielding, supplementary material relating to his Lisbon voyage, and full textual apparatus.
Henry Fielding In Our Time publishes many of the papers presented at the international conference held at the University of London 19-21 April 2007 to commemorate the tercentenary of his birth. Written by established scholars, including the acknowledged doyen of Fielding scholars, Martin C. Battestin of the University of Virginia, as well as younger scholars who successfully bring their recent research to bear on neglected areas of Fielding’s life and works, the essays offer a cross-section of current approaches to Fielding and his writings, from his ballad operas, poetry and political journalism , via Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones and Amelia—the novels for which he is still best known—to the social pamphlets written during his years at Bow Street as magistrate for Westminster and Middlesex. The collection should appeal both to undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as academics and general readers interested in the eighteenth-century in general, and Fielding’s contribution to the emergence and development of the novel form in particular.
Literature and theology have long been conversation partners. The great themes of human existence form the subject matter of their shared discussion. However, comedic literature has often been overlooked as a serious means to fostering such theological engagement. This book seeks to rectify this imbalance. By examining selected works of the eighteenth-century playwright and novelist Henry Fielding, we are shown that a comedic world has much to say that is of true theological significance. Recognizing the value of much traditional Fielding research, the author departs from its inherent determinism which, he believes, stifles more fruitful opportunities for interdisciplinary dialogue. Key to his desire to engage the comedic in this conversation, he introduces the interpretative tool of misplacement. By this is meant a continuous parting with the ineffable - the perpetual recognition that in comedic writing there is always a fragile sense of the other. Setting Fielding's fiction alongside works of contemporary philosophical theology and postmodern works of fiction, the author allows common critical zones such as epistemology, ethics, mimesis, canonicity, and revelation to be investigated. In all these areas, the novel, in Fielding's hands, displays a powerful comic resonance with a less deterministic theology, and subverts those assumed securities regarding the status of the individual in the world before God. Ultimately, the book offers the challenge of recognizing that the nature of the novel is inescapably theological and that theology itself is, indeed, fictive.
The eighteenth century has long been acknowledged as a pivotal period in Shakespeare's reception, transforming a playwright requiring 'improvement' into a national poet whose every word was sacred. Scholars have examined the contribution of performances, adaptations, criticism and editing to this process of transformation, but the crucial role of fiction remains overlooked. Shakespeare and the Eighteenth-Century Novel reveals for the first time the prevalence, and the importance, of fictional characters' direct quotations from Shakespeare. Quoting characters ascribe emotional and moral authority to Shakespeare, redeploy his theatricality, and mock banal uses of his words; by shaping in this way what is considered valuable about Shakespeare, the novel accrues new cultural authority of its own. Shakespeare underwrites, and is underwritten by, the eighteenth-century novel, and this book reveals the lasting implications for both of their reputations.
This volume explores the notion of the ‘self’ as it was elaborated and expressed by philosophers, novelists, churchmen, poets and diarists in the Enlightenment. The questions raised by the twelve essays and the introduction, explore the unity, diversity and fragility of a recognisably modern self.
A reexamination of Austen’s unpublished writings that uncovers their continuity with her celebrated novels—and that challenges distinctions between her “early” and “late” work Jane Austen’s six novels, published toward the end of her short life, represent a body of work that is as brilliant as it is compact. Her earlier writings have routinely been dismissed as mere juvenilia, or stepping stones to mature proficiency and greatness. Austen’s first biographer described them as “childish effusions.” Was he right to do so? Can the novels be definitively separated from the unpublished works? In Jane Austen, Early and Late, Freya Johnston argues that they cannot. Examining the three manuscript volumes in which Austen collected her earliest writings, Johnston finds that Austen’s regard and affection for them are revealed by her continuing to revisit and revise them throughout her adult life. The teenage works share the milieu and the humour of the novels, while revealing more clearly the sources and influences upon which Austen drew. Johnston upends the conventional narrative, according to which Austen discarded the satire and fantasy of her first writings in favour of the irony and realism of the novels. By demonstrating a stylistic and thematic continuity across the full range of Austen’s work, Johnston asks whether it makes sense to speak of an early and a late Austen at all. Jane Austen, Early and Late offers a new picture of the author in all her complexity and ambiguity, and shows us that it is not necessarily true that early work yields to later, better things.
"The present volume [3] is the first to appear of the five that will comprise The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (henceforth OHCREL). Each volume of OHCREL will have its own editor or team of editors"--Preface.
Henry Fielding is most well-known for his monumental novel Tom Jones. Though not necessarily common knowledge, Henry Fielding started his literary career as a dramatist and eventually transitioned to writing novels. Though vastly different in their approach and subject, there is a common thread in Fielding’s work that spanned his career: marriage. Errors and Reconciliations: Marriage in the Plays and Novels of Henry Fielding explores this theme, focusing on Fielding’s fascination with matrimony and the ever-present paradoxical nature of marriage in the first half of the eighteenth-century, as a state easily attained but nearly impossible to escape.
Epic into Novel looks at Henry Fielding's adaptation of classical epic in the context of what he called the 'Trade of . . . authoring'. Fielding was always keen to stress that his novels were modelled on classical literature. Equally, he was fascinated by—and wrote at length about—the fact that they were objects to be consumed. He recognised that he wrote in an age when an author had to consider himself 'as one who keeps a public Ordinary, at which all persons are welcome for their Money.' In describing his work, he alludes both to Homeric epic and to contemporary cookery books. This tension in Fielding's work has gone unexplored, a tension between his commitment to a classical tradition and his immersion in a print culture in which books were consumable commodities. This interest in the place of the ancients in a world of consumerism was inherited from the previous generation of satirists. The 'Scriblerians'—among them Jonathan Swift, John Gay, and Alexander Pope—repeatedly suggest in their work that classical values are at odds with modern tastes and appetites. Fielding, who had idolised these writers as a young man, developed many of their satiric routines in his own writing. But Fielding broke from Swift, Gay, and Pope in creating a version of epic designed to appeal to modern consumers. Henry Power provides new readings of works by Swift, Gay, and Pope, and of Fielding's major novels. He examines Fielding's engagement with various Scriblerian themes—primarily the consumption of literature, but also the professionalisation of scholarship, and the status of the author—and shows ultimately that Fielding broke with the Scriblerians in acknowledging and celebrating the influence of the marketplace on his work.