LoveReading4Kids Says
LoveReading4Kids Says
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.
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About
Tom Jones Synopsis
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.
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9780199536993 |
| Publication date: |
14th August 2008 |
| Author: |
Henry Fielding |
| Publisher: |
Oxford University Press |
| Format: |
Paperback |
| Pagination: |
916 pages |
| Series: |
Oxford World's Classics |
| Suitable For: |
|
| Recommendations: |
|
Author
About Henry Fielding
Henry Fielding was born in 1707 at Sharpham Park, near Glastonbury. He was educated privately at first and then at Eton. In 1725 he attempted to abduct an heiress and was bound over to keep the peace. He then went to London, where in 1728 he published a satirical poem, The Masquerade, and a comedy, Love in Several Masques.
From 1728 to 1729 he was a student of literature at Leyden University, returning to London in the autumn of the latter year. Between then and 1737 he wrote some twenty-five dramatic pieces, including comedies, adaptations of Molière, farces, ballad operas, burlesques and a series of topical satires, such as Pasquin and The Historical Register, which lampooned Sir Robert Walpole and his government.
It was partly because of this last play that Walpole introduced the Stage Licensing Act in 1737, which effectively ended Fielding's career as a dramatist. After this he embarked on a career in the law and was called to the Bar in 1740, but had little success as a barrister. In 1734 he married Charlotte Cradock, the model for Sophie Western and also for the heroine of his last novel, Amelia (1751).
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