TomJones论文资料.doc

An Introduction Henry Fielding's Tom Jones is both one of the great comic masterpieces of English literature and a major force in the development of the novel form. By 1749, the year Tom Jones appeared, the novel was only beginning to be recognized as a potentially literary form. Samuel Richardson's novel Clarissa had appeared only the year before, and for the most part in intellectual circles prose fiction was not considered a worthy pursuit. Despite the publication by Jonathan Swift, a member of the literary elite surrounding Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, of Gulliver's Travels in 1726, the sanctioned genres of the first half of the eighteenth century were verse and drama. The novels of Daniel Defoe, seen by many as purely adventure tales, were not regarded as worthy of serious consideration. They were, however, instrumental in the development of a suitable reading public, without which Fielding probably would not have attempted any form of sustained prose fiction. But while Defoe still followed the seventeenth century tradition of claiming his fiction was fact, and Richardson professed that his tales were moral tracts, emphasizing the instructional rather than the fictional aspect, Fielding was the first major novelist to unabashedly write fiction. At the same time, he undertook an initial critical theory of the new fictional form he was creating: together with the preface to Joseph Andrews (1742), the introductory chapters preceding the individual books in Tom Jones constitute the first extended body of work in English which attempts to define and explain the novel as a literary genre. In the preface Joseph Andrews, Fielding described his own fictional form as "a comic romance" or a "comic epic poem in prose," and in Tom Jones as a "heroical, historical prosaic poem" (IV, 1); a form of "prosai-comi-epic writing" (V, 1). In defining the novel as an epic genre, Fielding emphasized its function in presenting a broad picture of an era, but one,