Read complete books and articles on: Henry Fielding

Fielding, Henry - 1707–54, English novelist and dramatist. Born of a distinguished family, he was educated at Eton and studied law at Leiden. Settling in London in 1729, he began writing comedies, farces, and burlesques, the most notable being Tom Thumb (1730), and two satires, Pasquin (1736) and The Historical Register for 1736 (1737), which attacked the Walpole government and provoked the Licensing Act of 1737. This act, setting up a censorship of the stage, ended Fielding's dramatic career and turned him to the less inhibited form of the novel. In that genre he achieved his greatest success, beginning with his first novel, Joseph Andrews (1742), which started simply as a burlesque of Samuel Richardson's sentimental novel Pamela but developed into a great comic creation. He followed with Jonathan Wild (1743), the history of a superman of crime, which has been called the most sustained piece of irony in English. His masterpiece is Tom Jones (1749), a novel recounting the wild comic adventures of the good-hearted though highly fallible foundling, Tom Jones. In Tom and his guardian, Squire Allworthy, Fielding presents his concept of the ideal man, one in whom goodness and charity are combined with common sense. Because of its memorable characters and episodes, the brilliance of its plotting, and the generosity of its moral vision, Tom Jones is considered one of the greatest of English novels. Amelia (1751), his last novel, is a somewhat sentimental story about a young wife's devotion to her feckless husband, in which Fielding exposes numerous social evils of his day. Fielding had begun his serious study of law in 1737 and in 1740 was called to the bar. After spending several years as a political journalist, he was appointed justice of the peace for Westminster in 1748 and for Middlesex in 1749. A fearless and honest magistrate, he worked arduously in the administration of justice and the prevention of crime. Broken in health, he resigned his office in 1753 and the following year sailed for Portugal, where he died. His last work was the amusing journal Voyage to Lisbon (1755).

See biographies by W. L. Cross (3 vol., 1918, repr. 1963) and F. H. Duddon (1952, repr. 1966); studies by M. Johnson (1961), R. Alter (1969), R. Paulson, ed. (1962 and 1971), P. Lewis (1987), and A. J. Rivero (1989).

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16 of the Best Books and Articles on: Henry Fielding

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1.

A Henry Fielding Companion » Read Now
by Martin C. Battestin. 333 pgs.

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Best known as the author of Joseph Andrews (1742), Tom Jones (1749), and Amelia (1751), Henry Fielding was one of the most important pioneering English novelists, and his works continue to hold a central place in the literary canon. This reference book is a comprehensive guide to his life and...
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Best known as the author of Joseph Andrews (1742), Tom Jones (1749), and Amelia (1751), Henry Fielding was one of the most important pioneering English novelists, and his works continue to hold a central place in the literary canon. This reference book is a comprehensive guide to his life and writings. The volume is organized in several broad sections devoted to his residences, family and household, historical figures and literary influences, works, themes, and characters. Each section provides entries for individual items, many of which are accompanied by bibliographical references. The volume begins with a brief introductory essay and chronology and concludes with extensive bibliographical material. The sectional organization of the book invites study of particular aspects of Fielding's career, while an index provides convenient alphabetical access to the entries.
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2.

The Novels of Fielding (literary criticism) » Read Now
by Aurelien Digeon. 255 pgs.

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...Journal , November 25th, 1752 Henry Fielding 1 was born on April 22nd...good as any other; we again find Henry Fielding in 1725 with his valet, Joseph...elopement failed...
3.

Tom Jones » Read Now
by Henry Fielding, John Bender, Simon Stern. 920 pgs.

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Fielding's comic masterpiece of 1749 was immediately attacked as `A motley history of bastardism, fornication, and adultery'. Indeed, his populous novel overflows with a marvellous assortment of prudes, whores, libertines, bumpkins, misanthropes, hypocrites, scoundrels, virgins, and all too fallible...
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Fielding's comic masterpiece of 1749 was immediately attacked as `A motley history of bastardism, fornication, and adultery'. Indeed, his populous novel overflows with a marvellous assortment of prudes, whores, libertines, bumpkins, misanthropes, hypocrites, scoundrels, virgins, and all too fallible humanitarians. At the centre of one of the most ingenious plots in English fiction stands a hero whose actions were, in 1749, as shocking as they are funny today. Expelled from Mr Allworthy's country estate for his wild temper and sexual conquests, the good-hearted foundling Tom Jones loses his money, joins the army, and pursues his beloved across Britain to London, where he becomes a kept lover and confronts the possibility of incest. Tom Jones is rightly regarded as Fielding's greatest work, and one of the first and most influential of English novels. 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.
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4.

The Embodiment of Characters: The Representation of Physical Experience on Stage and in Print, 1728-1749 (Chap. 5 "Who She Was and What She Was: Female Characters and Physical Experience in Tom Jones") » Read Now
by Jones Deritter. 180 pgs.

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...HFL Martin Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life London: Routledge, 1990 . HFT Robert Hume, Henry Fielding and the London Theatre , 1728-1737...SI" Martin Battestin, "Henry...
5.

The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Chap. VIII "Fielding and the Epic Theory of the Novel," and Chap. IX "Fielding as Novelist: 'Tom Jones'") » Read Now
by Ian Watt. 319 pgs.

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...of the form; and, as Henry James pointed out with...Writing Founded by Mr. Fielding , 1751, p. 18. This...Cross, History of Henry Fielding New Haven, 1918...Dickson Cross...
6.

Trials and the Shaping of Identity in Tom Jones, in Studies in the Novel » Read Now
by John E. Loftis. 20 pgs.

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7.

The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great: And a Journey from This World to the Next » Read Now
by Henry Fielding. 338 pgs.

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...AND A JOURNEY FROM THIS WORLD TO THE NEXT BY HENRY FIELDING WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY HABLOT K. BROWNE "PHIZ...Langfanger, or Longfinger. He flourished in the reign of Henry...
8.

The Making of Jonathan Wild: A Study in the Literary Method of Henry Fielding » Read Now
by William Robert Irwin. 160 pgs.

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...STUDY IN THE LITERARY METHOD OF HENRY FIELDING NEW YORK COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY...Jonathan Wild is one of Henry Fieldings minor works; but as a study in...third volume of...
9.

The Grub-Street Opera » Read Now
by Henry Fielding, Edgar V. Roberts. 164 pgs.

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10.

Grub Street and the Ivory Tower: Literary Journalism and Literary Scholarship from Fielding to the Internet (Chap. 1 "Fielding, Grub Street, and Canary Wharf") » Read Now
by Jeremy Treglown, Bridget Bennett. 294 pgs.

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Literary criticism has been called a story of reading. In what conditions have the best critical stories been told? From Jenny Uglow's account of literary journalism in the world of Henry Fielding to Marjorie Perloff's praise for the impact of the Internet on poetry publishing and reviewing, Grub...
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Literary criticism has been called a story of reading. In what conditions have the best critical stories been told? From Jenny Uglow's account of literary journalism in the world of Henry Fielding to Marjorie Perloff's praise for the impact of the Internet on poetry publishing and reviewing, Grub Street and the Ivory Tower gives lively case-histories of the commercial and institutional contexts of writing about writing, with an emphasis on the vexed but at best mutually beneficial relationship between journalism and literary scholarship. Topics include the traffic between universities and the wider literary world in the `long' nineteenth century; the role of Blackwood's Magazine in the First World War; Virginia Woolf's work as a literary journalist; the early days of the London Review of Books; and the contested terrain of book reviewing in contemporary Ireland. Most of the contributors are scholars who also command a non-academic readership, as reviewers and otherwise: among them Valentine Cunningham, Hermione Lee, Karl Miller, Lorna Sage, and John Sutherland.
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11.

Theatrical Fielding, in Studies in the Literary Imagination » Read Now
by Thomas Lockwood. 10 pgs.

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12.

Fielding's Burlesque Drama: Its Place in the Tradition » Read Now
by Peter Lewis. 222 pgs.

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...University of Durham series 1. Fielding, Henry -- Dramatic works I. Title II...List of Plates Frontispiece : Henry Fielding Mansell Collection Plates 1...years and to bring...
13.

Henry Fielding's Theory of the Comic Prose Epic » Read Now
by Ethel Margaret Thornbury. 204 pgs.

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...AND LITERATURE NUMBER 30 HENRY FIELDINGS THEORY OF THE COMIC PROSE EPIC...sale of the entire library of Henry Fielding. Though there are only one or...especially in view of...
14.

The Columbia History of the British Novel ("Fielding and the Novel at Mid-Century" begins on p. 102) » Read Now
by John J. Richetti, John Bender, Deirdre David, Michael Seidel. 1066 pgs.

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What do Pamela, Shamela, and Evelina have in common? Who is Coningsby? Where is The Moonstone? When does one need A Room of One's Own? Why is it that Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit? And just how good is the British novel? These are just a few of the questions answered in The Columbia History of the...
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What do Pamela, Shamela, and Evelina have in common? Who is Coningsby? Where is The Moonstone? When does one need A Room of One's Own? Why is it that Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit? And just how good is the British novel? These are just a few of the questions answered in The Columbia History of the British Novel. John Richetti's comprehensive history takes us from the birth of the novel in the eighteenth century through its social and culture-conscious growing pains in the nineteenth century to its angst-ridden maturity in the twentieth century. Concise, cohesive, and complementary to any collection of must-read classics, The Columbia History of the British Novel challenges and enlightens us by examining canonical writers as well as women and postcolonial novelists. Discover the origins of the novel in the "scandalous" books of Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, and Delarivier Manley and follow its development through Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Laurence Sterne against the backdrop of the novel's meteoric rise in the 1700s. Follow Frances Burney and the rise of the woman novelist, and the gothic novel as invented by Horace Walpole and perfected by Mary Shelley and Matthew Lewis. Remember remarkable reunions in Jane Austen; the bond between chivalry, Waverley, and Sir Walter Scott; the Brontes, Amelia Opie, Maria Edgeworth, and the tradition of Romantic women's fiction; Charles Dickens and the professionalization of literature; George Eliot and the novel of ideas; and Wilkie Collins and the sensation mania of the 1860s. Continue through the nineteenth century with the "Condition of England" novels of Benjamin Disraeli and Elizabeth Gaskell, Hardy's tales of class and sexualdifference, and Anglo-Indian perspectives on the empire from Rudyard Kipling and Philip Meadows Taylor. Enter the twentieth century and examine the modern novel with Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. Then trace the anti-
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15.

A True-Born Englishman: Being the Life of Henry Fielding » Read Now
by M. P. Willcocks. 288 pgs.

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16.

Henry Fielding » Read Now
by Elizabeth Jenkins. 106 pgs.

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...THE ENGLISH NOVELISTS HENRY FIELDING HENRY FIELDING by ELIZABETH JENKINS Denver ALAN SWALLOW...EDINBURGH BOUND BY THE FRANKLIN BINDERY, CHICAGO HENRY FIELDING THE rise and...