Fielding, Henry | Elizabeth Kraft (essay date 1992)
Elizabeth Kraft (essay date 1992)
SOURCE: "Narrative Authority and the Controlling Consciousness in Fielding's Tom Jones," in her Character and Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Comic Fiction, University of Georgia Press, 1992, pp. 65-82.
[In the following chapter from her book Character and Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Comic Fiction, Kraft examines the way in which authorial narrative interrupts and replaces the representation of the characters' consciousness in Tom Jones.]
No one has ever seriously argued that there is no evidence of consciousness in Tom Jones. The narrator is clearly a thinking being, and throughout the introductory chapters we find ourselves as readers actively involved with the process of his thought.1 When, in chapter I of book 11, Fielding says, "The Slander of a Book is, in Truth, the Slander of the Author" (2: 569), we are quite prepared to admit the personal...
[The entire page is 9136 words long]
Navigate
