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First published in 1970, this selection of Fielding’s criticism is an important contribution to our understanding of Fielding and his age. It directs considerable light upon Fielding’s own critical views, with regard both to his own works and to eighteenth-century life and literature at large. The volume includes many of Fielding’s well-known and important statements on literature, society and morals, as well as many which are now difficult to obtain. The selection presents the full range of Fielding’s criticism, showing the relations between his statements concerning literature and his opinions on other matters, and drawing on the complete body of his work. The editor has provided a large-scale analytical introduction.
Fielding himself frequently stated that satire was his aim. Taking this statement as his point of departure, the author considers Fielding's criticism of men & manners, his attitude towards & his treatment of the literature, the politics, the learned professions, & the social conditions of his day.
Tom Jones is rightly regarded as Fielding's greatest work, and one of the first and most influential of English novels. Attacked at the time as `A motley history of bastardism, fornication, and adultery', it overflows with a marvellous assortment of prudes, whores, libertines, bumpkins, misanthropes, hypocrites, scoundrels, virgins, and all too fallible humanitarians. This carefully modernized edition is based on Fielding's emended fourth edition text and offers the most thorough notes, maps, and bibliography. The introduction uses the latest scholarship to examine how Tom Jones exemplifies the role of the novel in the emerging eighteenth-century public sphere. - ;Fielding's comic masterpiec...