Critical Essays on Henry Fielding

G. K. Hall's three series of critical essays give comprehensive coverage of major authors worldwide and throughout history. The full range of literary traditions and schools is represented. Each new volume is carefully conceived and developed to fill a gap in the literary criticism available today. Volume editors are established authorities on the lives, works, and critical receptions of their subjects. They are uniquely qualified to ensure the spectrum of critical controversies, trends, and techniques inspired by their subjects in their own countries and abroad, in their own eras and today. Each volume features: an introduction which provides the reader with a lucid overview of criticism from its beginnings illuminating controversies, evaluating approaches, and sorting out the schools of thought the most influential reviews and the best of reprinted scholarly essays a section devoted exclusively to reviews and reactions by the subject's contemporaries original essays, new translations, and revisions commissioned especially for the series previously unpublished materials such as interviews, lost letters, and manuscript fragments; a bibliography of the subject's writings and interviews; and a name and subject index. Long regarded as one of the founding fathers of the English novel, Henry Fielding was also a popular playwright, prolific essayist, and respected magistrate. In all, he wrote 25 plays as well as several celebrated literary works including Tom Jones, Amelia, and the parody Shamela, which he never claimed as his own but is commonly attributed to him. Building on the rich legacy of earlier Fielding criticism and reflecting the expansion of critical approaches to literary texts during the last two decades, this wide-ranging volume contains fourteen essays published in the 1980s and 1990s. The material is organized chronologically and observes the transition between Fielding as playwright and Fielding as novelist.

Booknews

Contains 14 essays on Fielding published during the 1980s and 1990s. The essays include one on Fielding's drama; multiple treatments of Jonathan Wild, Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, and Amelia; as well as some on diverse topics involving several work s. The editor's introduction begins by outlining the debate regarding Fielding's morality versus his reputation as a realistic novelist and his evolution through "Christian Humanism" to the more ambiguous moral intent of later works like Amelia. He compares reader responses to Fielding and his rival Richardson. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.