This is the second of three volumes representing the only modern edition of Fielding's dramatic works. Most of these plays have not appeared in print for a century, and never previously in fully-edited form. Fielding is best known as a classic novelist and the author of Tom Jones, but like his great model Cervantes, he came to novel-writing from an important first career in professional theatre. He wrote twenty-eight plays, including comedies, satiric extravaganzas, andballad operas. He was the leading playwright of his generation, an experimentalist and entrepreneur of dramatic form who sometimes also brought contemporary politics and public figures onto his stage with results even more dramatic off-stage.This volume presents nine plays from one of the most productive and successful periods of Fielding's theatre career. One of them, The Grub-Street Opera, is a ballad opera cheerfully mocking various public characters including the Prime Minister, Prince of Wales, and even King and Queen. Another, The Modern Husband, is a dark comedy attacking the cynical merchandising of sex, marriage, and influence among what passes for polite society in 1730s London. Most of the plays in thisvolume were major hits with long stage lives in repertory, including The Lottery, The Intriguing Chambermaid, and two of the great Molière adaptations of the century, The Mock Doctor and The Miser. Fielding wrote all four of those plays as star vehicles for the great Drury Lane musical actress Catherine Clive.The plays are given in critical unmodernized texts based on careful collation of the original editions, with explanatory notes and commentary on sources, stage history, and critical reception. All music is included, with appendices giving complete accounts of textual variation and bibliographic history for each play.

This is the second of three volumes representing the only modern edition of Fielding's dramatic works. Most of these plays have not appeared in print for a century, and never previously in fully-edited form. Fielding is best known as a classic novelist and the author of Tom Jones, but like his great model Cervantes, he came to novel-writing from an important first career in professional theatre. He wrote twenty-eight plays, including comedies, satiric extravaganzas, and ballad operas. He was the leading playwright of his generation, an experimentalist and entrepreneur of dramatic form who sometimes also brought contemporary politics and public figures onto his stage with results even more dramatic off-stage. This volume presents nine plays from one of the most productive and successful periods of Fielding's theatre career. One of them, The Grub-Street Opera, is a ballad opera cheerfully mocking various public characters including the Prime Minister, Prince of Wales, and even King and Queen. Another, The Modern Husband, is a dark comedy attacking the cynical merchandising of sex, marriage, and influence among what passes for polite society in 1730s London. Most of the plays in this volume were major hits with long stage lives in repertory, including The Lottery, The Intriguing Chambermaid, and two of the great Molière adaptations of the century, The Mock Doctor and The Miser. Fielding wrote all four of those plays as star vehicles for the great Drury Lane musical actress Catherine Clive. The plays are given in critical unmodernized texts based on careful collation of the original editions, with explanatory notes and commentary on sources, stage history, and critical reception. All music is included, with appendices giving complete accounts of textual variation and bibliographic history for each play.

Examines how and why marriage plots became the English novel's most popular form in the eighteenth century. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of eighteenth and early nineteenth-century English literature and culture as well as feminist literary history.

The good-natured Georgian libertinism that emerged maintained the subversive social, religious, sexual, and philosophical tenets of the old libertinism, but misogynist brutality was replaced by freedom and autonomy for the individual, whether male or female.

This work concentrates on how eighteenth-century feminine novelists articulate the concerns important to women's lives and fates, and argues that these novelists used their romances to combat the controlling ideologies of the age.

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.

Henry Fielding: A Literary Life characterizes Fielding's complex personality, in some ways full of contradiction, and yet resolved both by a deep knowledge of human nature, including his own, and by his innate social constructiveness and his gift for friendship and love. The book also details ways in which Fielding's complex attitudes contribute to the subject-matter of his plays and novels and to the rhetorical strategies that control their shape as well. It further shows that his work as lawyer, London magistrate, and social and political essayist was similarly informed.

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.