An accurate and comprehensive study of the political aspects of Fielding’s art has been sorely needed. As a result of decades of work by literary scholars and a series of great historians, such a study is finally possible. This volume addresses that need, and, in the light of a recent revival of interest in Fielding’s work, it arrives most opportunely. The author offers here a wide-ranging focus and a firm grip on the shifting complexities of Fielding’s political situations—the loyalties and enmities, factional alignments and fractious rhetoric—that allow a satisfactory understanding of Fielding’s political writing. Political writing in Fielding’s day, as in ours, was topical, concerned with evanescent problems and day-to-day needs that were familiar to contemporaries, but that are now recaptured only with greatest difficulty. This study constitutes a thorough reconstruction of Fielding’s political context and extricates from the context Fielding’s own political endeavours. Cleary’s work will make many of Felding’s previously unstudied work accessible to students and scholars of eighteenth-century English literature. A necessary point of reference to both literary specialists and historians concerned with eighteenth-century England.

This book presents and analyzes Magistrate (Justice of the Peace) Henry Fielding's impact on law and literature through his pamphlets, periodicals and novels, in the context of laws, legal affairs, legal administration, and the social-economic political and legal environment present in 18th century England. I demonstrate and argue that among novels of all time the most extensive and diversified coverage of laws, Justices of Peace, lawyers, crimes, and the socio-economic environment, particularly rural 18th century England. Of all the noteworthy 18th century novelists or fiction writers, Justice Henry Fielding is the only one who was also a jurist. This book is also focused on demonstrating how extensively Fielding was consumed throughout his life and the area of law, from his early age to his death, but with a far broader spectrum, education, and experience than anyone except perhaps Lord High Chancellor Hardwicke and Sir William Blackstone. Justice Henry Fielding traveled a long and diversified path in the legal arena to reach the level of expertise, which he deployed in providing his public with Tom Jones, Amelia, and Joseph Andrews as well as his journals and political pamphlets.

Henry Fielding In Our Time publishes many of the papers presented at the international conference held at the University of London 19-21 April 2007 to commemorate the tercentenary of his birth. Written by established scholars, including the acknowledged doyen of Fielding scholars, Martin C. Battestin of the University of Virginia, as well as younger scholars who successfully bring their recent research to bear on neglected areas of Fielding’s life and works, the essays offer a cross-section of current approaches to Fielding and his writings, from his ballad operas, poetry and political journalism , via Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones and Amelia—the novels for which he is still best known—to the social pamphlets written during his years at Bow Street as magistrate for Westminster and Middlesex. The collection should appeal both to undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as academics and general readers interested in the eighteenth-century in general, and Fielding’s contribution to the emergence and development of the novel form in particular.

Henry Fielding was one of the most interesting playwrights of his time because of his historical position, similar to that of George Bernard Shaw, and his awareness of what it meant to be a playwright at a time when the native dramatic tradition appeared to have settled down for a long sleep and when the only hope for an awakening lay in such low crowd-pleasers as farces, puppet shows, "laughing" tragedies, and ballad operas. By focusing on the plays themselves, Rivero tells the story of Fielding's dramatic career without burdening the reader with an exhaustive history of contemporary plays and playwrights. He provides us with a clear, critical account of Fielding's dramatic career in terms of trends in contemporary dramatic affairs that help to account for his artistic choices in individual plays.

Reproduction of the original: The Works of Henry Fielding by George Saintsbury

The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling students and researchers to read the material themselves.