Best remembered as the author of Joseph Andrews (1742), Tom Jones (1749) and Amelia (1751), Henry Fielding was one of the most important pioneering English novelists of the eighteenth century, and his works continue to occupy a central place in the literary canon. During the 1730s he was the most dominant playwright in London since John Dryden; and in his official capacity as a magistrate, he addressed serious social problems and invented the modern metropolitan police. This reference book makes essential information available to readers interested in Fielding, his life, and his works. The volume is organized in sections devoted to such topics as Fielding's residences; his family members and household; historical persons, including authors who influenced him; his works; themes and topics important to his writings; and characters in his plays and prose fiction. Each section contains numerous entries on particular items, and many entries provide brief bibliographical information. While the sectional organization of the volume invites the reader to explore broad areas of interest, a thorough index provides convenient alphabetical access to the entries. A brief introductory essay and chronology begin the volume, and the book concludes with an extensive bibliography.

Now best known for three great novels - Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews and Amelia - Henry Fielding (1707–54) was one of the most controversial figures of his time. Prominent first as a playwright, then as a novelist and political journalist, and finally as a justice of peace, Fielding made a substantial contribution to eighteenth-century culture, and was hugely influential in the development of the novel as a form, both in Britain and more widely in Europe. This collection of specially-commissioned essays by leading scholars describes and analyses the many facets of Fielding's work in theatre, fiction, journalism and politics. In addition it assesses his unique contribution to the rise of the novel as the dominant literary form, the development of the law, and the political and literary culture of eighteenth-century Britain. Including a chronology and guide to further reading, this volume offers a comprehensive account of Fielding's life and work.

The works of Henry Fielding, though written nearly three hundred years ago, retain their sense of comedy and innovation in the face of tradition, and they easily engage the twenty-first-century student with many aspects of eighteenth-century life: travel, inns, masquerades, political and religious factions, the '45, prisons and the legal system, gender ideals and realities, social class. Part 1 of this volume, "Materials," discusses the available editions of Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, Shamela, Jonathan Wild, and Amelia; suggests useful critical and contextual works for teaching them; and recommends helpful audiovisual and electronic resources. The essays of part 2, "Approaches," demonstrate that many of the methods and models used for one novel-- the romance tradition, Fielding's legal and journalistic writing, his techniques as a playwright, the ideas of Machiavelli-- can be adapted to others.

In the past twenty years our understanding of the novel's emergence in eighteenth-century Britain has drastically changed. Drawing on new research in social and political history, the twelve contributors to this Companion challenge and refine the traditional view of the novel's origins and purposes. In various ways each seeks to show that the novel is not defined primarily by its realism of representation, but by the new ideological and cultural functions it serves in the emerging modern world of print culture. Sentimental and Gothic fiction and fiction by women are discussed, alongside detailed readings of work by Defoe, Swift, Richardson, Henry Fielding, Sterne, Smollett, and Burney. This multifaceted picture of the novel in its formative decades provides a comprehensive and indispensable guide for students of the eighteenth-century British novel, and its place within the culture of its time.

In this Companion, leading scholars and critics address the work of the most celebrated and enduring novelists from the British Isles (excluding living writers): among them Defoe, Richardson, Sterne, Austen, Dickens, the Brontës, George Eliot, Hardy, James, Lawrence, Joyce, and Woolf. The significance of each writer in their own time is explained, the relation of their work to that of predecessors and successors explored, and their most important novels analysed. These essays do not aim to create a canon in a prescriptive way, but taken together they describe a strong developing tradition of the writing of fictional prose over the past 300 years. This volume is a helpful guide for those studying and teaching the novel, and will allow readers to consider the significance of less familiar authors such as Henry Green and Elizabeth Bowen alongside those with a more established place in literary history.

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.