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A Study Guide for Henry Fielding's "Joseph Andrews"
A Study Guide for Henry Fielding's "Joseph Andrews"
A Study Guide for Henry Fielding's "Joseph Andrews"
Ebook45 pages27 minutes

A Study Guide for Henry Fielding's "Joseph Andrews"

By Gale and Cengage

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A Study Guide for Henry Fielding's "Joseph Andrews," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateJun 15, 2016
ISBN9781535826662
A Study Guide for Henry Fielding's "Joseph Andrews"

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    A Study Guide for Henry Fielding's "Joseph Andrews" - Gale

    10

    Joseph Andrews

    Sandra Benitez

    1993

    Introduction

    Henry Fielding's first novel is generally referred to by the abbreviated title Joseph Andrews, but the complete title is The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and His Friend Mr. Abraham Adams. It recounts the comic adventures of a young footman (servant) and his absent-minded friend, Parson Adams, as they travel from London back home to the countryside. Fielding characterized his novel as a comic epic-poem in prose, linking it not only with the fictional prose of such contemporaries as Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson but also with the classical epic poems that were being imitated by eighteenth-century British poets.

    Fielding's impetus for writing the book, which is among the first true novels written in English, was the enormous success of Richardson's Pamela (1741). The book was an epistolary novel, a novel written in the form of epistles, or letters. It tells the story of a virtuous serving girl who resists the efforts of her master to seduce her. Fielding was outraged at what he regarded as the moral hypocrisy in Richardson's book, for it depicted virtue as a commodity, a valuable asset for a woman. He also believed that the epistolary form was creaky and necessarily led to too much irrelevant detail. Accordingly, in 1741 he wrote and published anonymously Shamela, a brief travesty—that is, an extravagant parody—of Richardson's novel. With Joseph Andrews, his intention was to continue his satiric attack on Richardson by tracing the career of Pamela's brother, Joseph, but soon the satire evolved into something much larger—a genuine novel that delighted readers with its comic characters and situations, its erudition, and its philosophical asides. Originally published in London in 1742, the novel has been a challenge for modern textual editors, for in the decade after its first publication it went through five editions, each one incorporating the author's revisions, but also incorporating new printer's errors.

    Author Biography

    Henry Fielding was born on April 22, 1707, at Sharpham Park in Somerset, England. He was educated at Eton beginning in 1719, and after several years in London as a man-about-town and writer in the 1720s, he studied law at the University of Leiden in Holland. Lacking money to continue his education on the continent, he returned to London and embarked on a career as a playwright. Perhaps his most famous play was Tragedy of Tragedies; or, the Life and Death of Tom Thumb (1731), a farcical play that mocked English tragedies.

    Fielding's career as a playwright was short-lived, in part because his satirical plays criticized the government, leading the British Parliament to pass the Theatrical Licensing Act of 1737. This law, which required

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