The works of Henry Fielding, though written nearly three hundred years ago, retain their sense of comedy and innovation in the face of tradition, and they easily engage the twenty-first-century student with many aspects of eighteenth-century life: travel, inns, masquerades, political and religious factions, the '45, prisons and the legal system, gender ideals and realities, social class.Part 1 of this volume, "Materials," discusses the available editions of Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, Shamela, Jonathan Wild, and Amelia; suggests useful critical and contextual works for teaching them; and recommends helpful audiovisual and electronic resources. The essays of part 2, "Approaches," demonstrate that many of the methods and models used for one novel--the romance tradition, Fielding's legal and journalistic writing, his techniques as a playwright, the ideas of Machiavelli--can be adapted to others.

Product Description: In Women Novelists and the Ethics of Desire, 1684-1814, Elizabeth Kraft radically alters our conventional views of early women novelists by taking seriously their representations of female desire. To this end, she reads the fiction of Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, Eliza Haywood, Sarah Fielding, Charlotte Smith, Frances Burney, and Elizabeth Inchbald in light of ethical paradigms drawn from biblical texts about women and desire...read more

Product Description: Every ending marks a potential beginning; every act of reading is, in a very real sense an act of re-writing; and to revise is, literally, to re-see. These bits of conventional wisdom underlie the topic explored in this volume's collection of essays by literary critics who want to know more about the instinct to continue and the impulse to revise an existing text...read more

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Product Description: In The Young Philosopher, George Delmont embraces an agrarian life and devotes himself to the pursuit of knowledge. But it is George's love Medora Glenmorris and her mother Laura who provide the emotional core of the novel. Contrasting the pain and suffering of individuals with the idealism of the French Revolution and the hope provided by glimpses of life in America, Smith exposes philosophical enlightenment as an ineffective weapon for fighting the widespread corruption of English society...read more

Product Description: Explores the paradox of a practicing and devout clergyman whose works reflect a preoccupation with the sexual body. xviii+163 pages including Chronology, Notes & References, Selected Bibliography, and Index. A volume in Twayne's English Authors Series...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The eighteenth-century novel developed amid an emerging emphasis on individualism that clashed with long-cherished beliefs in hierarchy and stability. Though the comic novelists, unlike Defoe and Richardson, avoided total involvement in the mind of any one character, they were nonetheless fundamentally concerned with the nature of consciousness...read more