Joseph Andrews
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Joseph Andrews, or The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams, was the first published full-length novel of the English author and magistrate Henry Fielding. Published in 1742 and defined by Fielding as a ‘comic romance’, it represents the coming together of the two competing aesthetics of eighteenth-century literature: the mock-heroic and neoclassical (and, by extension, aristocratic) approach of Augustans such as Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift; and the popular, domestic prose fiction of novelists such as Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson.
The novel draws on a variety of inspirations. Written ‘in imitation of the manner of Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote’, the work owes much of its humour to the techniques of burlesque developed by Cervantes, and its subject-matter to the seemingly loose arrangement of events, digressions and lower-class characters to the genre of writing known as picaresque. In deference to the literary tastes and recurring tropes of the period, it relies on bawdy humour, a mystery surrounding unknown parentage and concludes happily with a marriage, but conversely is rich in philosophical digressions and classical erudition.
[edit] Background
Fielding’s first venture into prose fiction in came a year previously with the publication in pamphlet form of Shamela, a travesty of, and direct response to, the stylistic failings and moral hypocrisy that Fielding saw in Richardson’s Pamela. Richardson’s epistolary tale of a resolute servant girl, armed only with her ‘virtue’, battling against her master’s attempts at seduction had become an overnight literary sensation in 1741. The implicit moral message – that a girl’s chastity has eventual value as a commodity – as well as the awkwardness of the epistolary form in dealing with ongoing events, and the triviality of the detail which the form necessitates, were some of the main targets of Fielding’s parody.
Richardson would continue to be a target of Fielding’s first novel, but the Pamela phenomenon was but the most popular of what he saw as a culture of literary abuses in the mid-eighteenth century. Colley Cibber, poet laureate and hero of Pope’s Dunciad, is identified in the first chapter of the novel as another offender against propriety, morality and literary value.
The impetus for the novel, as Fielding claims in the preface, is the establishment of a genre of writing ‘which I do not remember to have been hitherto attempted in our language’, defined as the ‘comic epic-poem in prose’: a work of prose fiction, epic in length and variety of incident and character, in the hypothetical spirit of Homer’s lost comic poem. As becomes apparent from the first few chapters of the novel in which Richardson and Cibber are parodied mercilessly, the real germ of Joseph Andrews is Fielding’s objection to the moral and technical limitations of the popular literature of his day. But while Shamela started and finished as a sustained subversion of a rival work, Joseph Andrews merely uses the depravation of popular literature as a springboard for Fielding to conceive more fully his own philosophy of prose fiction.
[edit] Plot summary
Fielding set out to parody Pamela, and his central character, Joseph Andrews, is supposedly Pamela's brother. Unlike Pamela, the story is not told through letters, but through the voice of a separate narrator. The story is comic and ribald, beginning with the virtuous young Joseph being thrown out of his employment because of his refusal to be seduced by the lady of the house (Lady Booby). Unemployed and cast out in London, Joseph decides to return home and seek out his beloved Fanny. On his way home he successively meets up with his old friend Parson Abraham Adams and Fanny herself. All three encounter many adventures in the course of their travel home. Besides Abraham Adams, the novel features many exhilarating characters, such as Mrs. Slipslop who, just like Lady Booby, attempts to seduce Joseph; Parson Trulliber who is a mercantile hog-raiser; Beau Didapper, a short gentleman who is trying to seduce Fanny; and Mrs. Tow-wouse, an inn-keeper's wife who captures her husband making sexual advances to a servant-girl. As other novels of the 18th century, Joseph Andrews includes a few independent stories, such as "The History of Leonora".
[edit] External links
Full text of Joseph Andrews from Project Gutenberg
