Kissing, Joseph, is but a Prologue to a Play. Can I believe a young Fellow of your Age and Complexion will be content with Kissing?
Joseph Andrews, Henry Fielding s first full-length novel, depicts the many colourful and often hilarious adventures of a comically chaste servant. After being sacked for spurning the lascivious Lady Booby, Joseph takes to the road, accompanied by his beloved Fanny Goodwill, a much-put-upon foundling girl, and Parson Adams, a man often duped and humiliated, but still a model of Christian charity. In the boisterous short taleShamela, a...

A foundling of mysterious parentage brought up by Mr. Allworthy on his country estate, Tom Jones is deeply in love with the seemingly unattainable Sophia Western, the beautiful daughter of the neighboring squire though he sometimes succumbs to the charms of the local girls. When Tom is banished to make his own fortune and Sophia follows him to London to escape an arranged marriage, the adventure begins. A vivid Hogarthian panorama of eighteenth-century life, spiced with danger and intrigue, bawdy exuberance and good-natured authorial interjections, Tom Jones is one of the greatest and most...

This volume, which completes the edition's coverage of Henry Fielding's journalism, provides a view of eighteenth-century journalism very different from the more genteel Tatler-Spectator tradition, and complicates the familiar image of Fielding the moralist. Fielding's contributions to The Champion are not only among his most energetic and intriguing works in the genre; they also have a dense political background, of interest to historians studying the interface between journalism and politicians of the time, as well as the role of newspaper publishers.

This is the first of three volumes of plays by Henry Fielding, whose vibrant early career in theatre has been overshadowed by his later fame as the author of novels like Tom Jones. This edition makes his plays, and his rich gift for theatrical comedy, accessible for the first time in modern form.

This book completes the authoritative Wesleyan Edition of Fielding's nondramatic writings. It features two of Fielding's classic works: The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon written as he sailed to Portugal hoping, in vain, to recover his health; and Shamela, the hilarious parody of Richardson's Pamela that led to Joseph Andrews and the beginning of his career as novelist. The volume also includes every other work of Fielding's not to be found in the twelve previous volumes of the nondramatic writings. Here the reader will find in section I, Occasional Verse: "The Masquerade"; the unfinished...

"Backgrounds" contains generous extracts from works that Fielding satirized--Pamela and Conyer Middleton'sDedication to the Life of Cicero--and emulated--Gil Blas and selections from Don Quixote, the Roman Comique, and Le Paysan Parvenu. The section concludes with a general explanation of the political and religious contexts in which Joseph Andrews was written. "Criticism" offers a broad range of responses to the novel. Contemporary assessments include selected letters of Thomas Gray, William Shenstone, Samuel Richardson, and others as well as commentary...

As in the previous edition, "Contemporary Reactions" by such noteworthy commentators as Samuel Richardson, Samuel Johnson, and the Hill sisters provide rich historical context "Criticism" is a collection of fourteen interpretations of the novel spanning the years 1826-1990 by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Forsyth, Kenneth Rexroth, R. S. Crane, John Preston, William Empson, Wayne C. Booth, Martin Battestin, Maaja A. Stewart, Eleanor N. Hutchens, Sean Shesgreen, Frederick W. Hilles, and Sheridan Baker A new Chronology and an updated Selected Bibliography are also included.

Henry Fielding (1707-54) began his writing career as a playwright and before the age of 30 produced a great number of comedies, farces and burlesques. His wit was already apparent, and his admirers included Swift who particularly enjoyed his Tom Thumb. His Pasquin, A Dramatick Satire on the Times was in part responsible for the ensuing restrictive censorship of plays with the Licensing Act of 1737. Fielding practised at law, wrote essays and poems, ran a few journals - but remains most famous for his novels. He began Joseph Andrews as a parody of the sentimentalism of Richardson's Pamela, and...

English Literature boasts three comic worthies - three great creations that will live for ever. Pickwick and Falstaff are better known, but Parson Adams, who bestrides Joseph Andrews like a colossus, is of the same company, the favourite of every reader who encounters him in these picaresque pages. He lives, and so do all the rest of the wonderful characters, for seldom was a novel so rich in incident and all round excellence. Says George Saintsbury: The hero and heroine are surprisingly human where most writers would have made them sticks. And the rest require no allowance. Lady Booby, few...