Tom Jones

One of the themes of Tom Jones is appearance vs. reality. Using this theme, Fielding exposes what he sees as the hypocrisy of contemporary English society. The character of Lady Bellaston is a...

Humor is really a very broad term that simply refers to something that is or is meant to be funny. There are lots of ways to produce humor: wit, irony, sarcasm, farce, puns, burlesque, hyperbole,...

In Tom Jones, Henry Fielding certainly reveals distortions in human behavior, and most often, when authors do that, their purpose is to provide moral corrections for such distortions. Let's look at...

The Enlightenment's fundamental precepts about how human beings are good and how individuals are essentially created by their own experiences form the basis for Fielding's work. As a character,...

Because Tom Jones himself is a foundling, he is a liminal character who is enacting self-fashioning through his encounters with people of various classes and situations in life. His interactions...

In Tom Jones, Henry Fielding explores several themes related to morality in the British society of his day. As he addresses the relationship between virtue and vice through diverse characters,...

A picaresque novel is characterized as being composed of a series of adventures centered on a single protagonist. These adventures take the central character to a variety of places and introduce...

Marriage in Henry Fielding's The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling, is a rather convoluted affair (no pun intended, although there were more affairs in marriage than there was fidelity in...

The reader is introduced to the character of Sophia Western in Book 4, Chapter 2. Quickly, we realize that she is going to be the story's main heroine and Tom's major love interest. Tom is...

Tom Jones's narrator is the author himself, namely, Fielding. He uses third person omniscient and is able to bring us the depth of each character as well as a strong story line told from his own...

Fielding refers to his text as a history as he writes, although this is often to distinguish it from a romance. The depth of characterisation and in some areas, and the lively generalisation of...

Squire Allworthy returns to his estate from London to find an infant abandoned in his chamber. He entrusts the child to the care of his sister and brings the boy, Tom, up as a member of the family...

Dialogue in Fielding's Tom Jones takes a second place to the narrator who, is a sense, is the main character since the narrator makes himself personable through an actual introduction and comments...

If by prefatory "essays" you mean (1) his dedication to Lyttleton, "To the Honourable GEORGE LYTTLETON, ESQ; One of the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury" and (2) "Chapter i. — The introduction...

Fielding employs a variety of literary techniques to tell the story. He combines epic, picaresque, and epistolary forms. The technique that might be confusing is picaresque. Picaresque means...

The novel is told through the eyes of a narrator who many assume to be Fielding himself. However, Fielding also used many letters written by his characters. So, in essence, his characters help tell...

Henry Fielding published The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (the novel's full title) in 1749, and it's never really gone out of style or out of print; it's the rare older novel that is enjoyed...

There is no difference between "epic" and "conventional epic." Let me explain. The epic originated as a poetic form and is governed by certain rules as to form, structure and style. For example,...

To discuss Henry Fielding's Tom Jones as high burlesque, we first need to define the term. We'll begin with burlesque in general. Burlesque is a literary style that mocks and ridicules its subject...

For some reason, novelists in 18th century England often used the issue of incest as a plot device. Usually the incest was a near-miss. Siblings would be separated at birth and find out at the last...

The father-daughter relationships in Tom Jones is not one of Hallmark cards. IT's not as if the relationships are bad or abusive, but rather, they are just distant. Think about Squire Weston, and...

There are several instances of digressions in Tom Jones. One example of them is the introduction of each chapter. Fielding gives us a hint of what the reader is to expect in the chapter that he or...

This is a more difficult question than it first appears to be. There cannot be many people in the twenty-first century who turn first (or at all) to eighteenth-century novels for comedy. Other...

This is an excellent question, and it can best be answered by refering to the theme of jealousy, spite and revenge, and how it is shown to pervade all of the characters, no matter what their social...

It is one of the hallmarks of great literature that it remains relevant and relatable long after the specific social conditions which gave rise to it, and which it describes, have passed into...

Certainly, there is much in Tom Jonesthat the modern day reader who experiences economic challenge could understand. Tom is poor and must revert to specific actions because of his impoverished...

Texts make various different types of demands on the reader. Some are densely written and philosophically complex. Others contain many moral ambiguities and challenge the reader's way of looking at...

I believe the passage to which you are referring is the one where the puppet master is talking about morality in puppet shows. In these lines, the puppet master is saying that the importance of...

First, one should note that the sentences in Tom Jones are not particularly long or complex for his period. Unfortunately, syntactic attention spans of English language readers and average sentence...

In the most general sense, the relevance of these episodes is structural and thematic. That is to say, the novel blends structures from epic poetry and from the picaresque novel (such as Don...