The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling by Henry Fielding

2007 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 178-179
Author(s):  
Brian McCrea
Keyword(s):  
Henry Fielding ◽  
Tom Jones ◽  
History Of

scholarly journals Staging Henry Fielding: The Author-Narrator in Tom Jones On Screen

Authorship ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Eli Løfaldli
Keyword(s):  
Henry Fielding ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Television Series ◽  
Adaptation Theory ◽  
Tom Jones ◽  
History Of

As recent adaptation theory has shown, classic-novel adaptation typically sets issues connected to authorship and literal and figurative ownership into play. This key feature of such adaptations is also central to the screen versions of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749). In much of Fielding’s fiction, the narrator, typically understood as an embodiment of Fielding himself, is a particularly prominent presence. The author-narrator in Tom Jones is no exception: not only is his presence strongly felt throughout the novel, but through a variety of means, ‘The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling’ is also distinctly marked as being under his control and ownership. The two adaptations of Fielding’s novel, a 1963 film and a 1997 television series, both retain the figure of the author-narrator, but differ greatly in their handling of this device and its consequent thematic ramifications. Although the 1963 film de-emphasises Henry Fielding’s status as proprietor of the story, the author-narrator as represented in the film’s voiceover commentary is a figure of authority and authorial control. In contrast, the 1997 adaptation emphasises Fielding’s ownership of the narrative and even includes the author-narrator as a character in the series, but this ownership is undermined by the irreverent treatment to which he is consistently subjected. The representations of Henry Fielding in the form of the author-narrator in both adaptations are not only indicative of shifting conceptions of authorship, but also of the important interplay between authorship, ownership and adaptation more generally.

Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones

2017 ◽  
pp. 339-344
Author(s):  
Richard Braverman
Keyword(s):  
Henry Fielding ◽  
Tom Jones ◽  
History Of

Tom Jones

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Fielding
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Fourth Edition ◽  
Tom Jones ◽  
History Of

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.

Aristotle's Approach to Poetry

1981 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-39
Author(s):  
B. R. Rees
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Major Part ◽  
Structural Pattern ◽  
Classical Text ◽  
Samson Agonistes ◽  
Tom Jones ◽  
Artistic Representation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Western European ◽  
First Time

These are the opening words of Aristotle's Poetics, generally recognized as the most influential work in the history of Western European drama and poetic theory since the Renaissance. The initial statement of the scope of the inquiry is a formidable one; but a reader coming to it for the first time might well be forgiven for concluding that it promises far more than it achieves. Is it possible, he might ask, that all this is contained in a slim volume occupying no more than 47 pages in the Oxford Classical Text and 45 in the Penguin translation? Reading further, he might become even more disillusioned: what he discovers is that, after a very brief and perfunctory introduction on poetry as a form of mimesis or artistic representation, Aristotle limits himself to a discussion of tragedy, a cursory treatment of epic, and a few passing references to comedy, and that, even in the case of tragedy, by far the major part of the argument is devoted to an examination of plot. Can this really be the work which excited scholars in the Renaissance, inspired Milton to write Samson Agonistes, an Aristotelian drama if there ever was one, provided the structural pattern and dramatic conventions for the plays of Racine and Corneille, gave Fielding the principles on which he based his Tom Jones, influenced Goethe and Lessing and, through Lessing, Coleridge, and has won the attention and admiration of critics writing in English from James Harris at the end of the eighteenth century to Richard MacKeon in the second half of the twentieth? And, if so, why?

Notes on Three of Fielding's Plays

PMLA ◽  
1937 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 359-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles B. Woods
Keyword(s):  
Henry Fielding ◽  
New Haven ◽  
History Of

The only adequate and trustworthy account of Fielding's théâtre is that given by W. L. Cross in his three-volume biography, The History of Henry Fielding (New Haven, 1918). Yet, in my opinion, three of Fielding's plays, The Letter-Writers (1731), The Modern Husband (1732), and Eurydice Hiss'd (1737), have received inadequate treatment from Professor Cross, for he has failed to indicate their sources properly.

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