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.

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.

The Pamela Debate

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Lockwood
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Samuel Richardson ◽  
Henry Fielding ◽  
Usual Sense ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Tom Jones ◽  
To Come ◽  
As If

This chapter examines a decisive period in English literary history during the 1740s. This decade saw Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding falling into an unplanned but extraordinary artistic competition that would open two vital channels of production in the novel-writing to come: in Richardson's case toward the representation of inward experience as if mediated by no external authority, in Fielding's toward worldly experience as if mediated wholly by an authoritative storyteller. They did not compete in the usual sense, but such was their entangled proximity it nevertheless seemed a contest. The decade began with Richardson's Pamela (1740), followed by Fielding's Joseph Andrews (1742), and ended with Richardson's Clarissa (1747–8) and Fielding's Tom Jones (1749). This second pair of novels has long since established itself as the more powerful of the two, rightly enough, but against any other novels of the period the first would easily command superiority.

Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones

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

The Stage Career of Eliza Haywood

1964 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
John R. Elwood
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Jonathan Swift ◽  
Henry Fielding ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
Eliza Haywood ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Domestic Novel ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Way

Female playwrights of varying degrees of quality were reasonably plentiful in late seventeenth and early eighteenth century England; but, except for Eliza Haywood, few of these playwrights doubled as actresses, at least with sufficient success for us to be aware of their talents. Even the stage career of Mrs. Haywood, one extending at least from 1715 to 1737, has not been documented in its entirety before now. It deserves attention because it adds some details to the scanty biography of this woman who is best known as a novelist, a novelist who turned out scandal chronicles long before Richardson made the novel morally acceptable, and who in 1751 produced what may be the first domestic novel in English,The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless. Along the way she had some success as a publisher, as the first woman writer of a periodical for women, as a poet, and as a playwright and actress. It was her efforts in the theater that drew the attention of such men as Jonathan Swift and Richard Savage and brought her into a rather lengthy association with Henry Fielding. And it was her theatrical experience that contributed much to her eventual skill as a novelist. She liked the stage, and much of what we like in her later work she owed to the stage.

scholarly journals SOCIAL PROTEST AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-114
Author(s):  
Dohal Gassim-H.
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Daniel Defoe ◽  
Samuel Richardson ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Social Protest ◽  
Main Concern ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Robinson Crusoe ◽  
Tom Jones ◽  
History Of

The early eighteenth century witnessed the early development of the dominant literary form of modern times, the novel. The novel emerged as a form with structure and interplay between individuals and their relationships to society. As a new form, the novel tends to make some significant, critical, and social statements about the society. Hence, the novel is used to create a new environment that is related to life and people. Indeed, this is what makes the novel appeal to readers as a new genre. Novelists either try to deal with daily social problems that happen in the lives of people or pretend that they are telling real stories. It is not surprising to find that Daniel Defoe molds his Robinson Crusoe (1719)on a real story while Samuel Richardson in Pamela (1740) turns out to be didactic to meet the needs of the growing numbers of female readers. On his part, Henry Fielding tries to expose his society to the readers in his masterpiece The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749); from now on Tom Jones. Accordingly, the novel becomes popular at this time because it has something relevant to the mob; it deals with their social life, and they can identify themselves with its characters in the actual daily life. Through Tom Jones, Fielding presented “a true and realistic picture of human nature” (Kettle, 71). As long as its main concern is the existing society, novelists feel so involved that their criticism becomes direct, frank, and effective. My paper deals with these concerns as depicted in the novels mentioned above.

Henry Fielding and the Progress of Romance

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Black
Keyword(s):  
Henry Fielding ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Tom Jones ◽  
Generic Structures

Henry Fielding’s novels fit centrally into recent revisionist accounts of the novel as an international genre defined by translation and adaptation and even by its filiations with romance. Against the standard story of the novel rising as it moves away from romance, Fielding’s novels develop as they approach romance. His art increases in power and sophistication as he more fully explores the possibilities of romance, both structural and modal. As Fielding moves from Jonathan Wild to Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, and Amelia, the productive tension between satire and romance that organizes all his novels is increasingly resolved by integrating the satire into the structures of romance; love is increasingly explored and not just assumed; and the romance heroine becomes increasingly central. Fielding uses the modal forces of romance to address the issues raised by its expansive, dialogic, and intertextual generic structures.

Henry Fielding, the Novel, and Classical Legal Rhetoric

1996 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 413-440 ◽  
Author(s):  
Glen McClish
Keyword(s):  
Henry Fielding ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Legal Rhetoric ◽  
Tom Jones ◽  
Forensic Rhetoric

Abstract: This essay explores how classical legal or forensic rhetoric informs Henry Fielding's work as a novelist. Focusing on the dichotomous or contradictory application and characterization of forensic rhetoric in Fielding's three major novels—joseph Andrews, Tom jones, and Amelia—I will suggest that the exuberance and confidence that tjrpify the novelist's portrayal of legal rhetoric within the diegetic realm of his narrators is undermined or rendered problematic by the wariness and pessimism with which the same kind of discourse is presented within the mimetie worlds of the stories themselves. After speculating about the biographical, historical, and aesthetic ramifications of this dichotomy, the essay concludes with brief discussion of the ideological significance of Fielding's portrayal of the lawyerly art of persuasion.

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
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