Презентация :" Henry Fielding".

Henry Fielding. Prepared by. Shabazova Ann 11-a

Henry Fielding was an 18th century English writer and magistrate who established the mechanisms of the modern novel through such works as Tom Jones and Amelia.

Fielding was born of a family that by tradition traced its descent to a branch of the Habsburgs. The 1st earl of Denbigh, William Fielding, was a direct ancestor, while Henry’s father, Col. His mother died just before his 11th birthday. His father having married again, Fielding was sent to Eton College, where he laid the foundations of his love of literature and his considerable knowledge of the classics. There he befriended George Lyttelton, who was later to be a statesman and an important patron to him.

Leaving school at 17, a strikingly handsome youth, he settled down to the life of a young gentleman of leisure; but four years later, after an abortive elopement with an heiress and the production of a play at the Drury Lane Theatre in London, he resumed his classical studies at the University of Leiden in Holland.

After 18 months he had to return home because his father was no longer able to pay him an allowance. In all, he wrote some 25 plays. Although his dramatic works have not held the stage, their wit cannot be denied. He was essentially a satirist; for instance, The Author’s Farce (1730) displays the absurdities of writers and publishers while Rape upon Rape (1730) satirizes the injustices of the law and lawyers.

In 1737 he produced at the Little Theatre in the Hay (later the Haymarket Theatre), London, his Historical Register, For the Year 1736, in which the prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, was represented practically undisguised and mercilessly ridiculed. It was not the first time Walpole had suffered from Fielding’s pen, and his answer was to push through Parliament the Licensing Act, by which all new plays had to be approved and licensed by the lord chamberlain before production.

The passing of this act marked the end of Fielding’s career as a playwright. The 30-year-old writer had a wife and two children to support but no source of income. He had married Charlotte Cradock in 1734, this time after a successful elopement, the culmination of a four-year courtship.

In April 1741 there appeared a parody entitled An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, satirizing Richardson’s sentimentality and prudish morality. It was published anonymously and, though Fielding never claimed it, Shamela was generally accepted as his work in his lifetime, and stylistic evidence supports the attribution.

Tom Jones. Tom Jones, however, might have been made for the screen. Never mind its numerous chapters and teeming cast of misfits and scoundrels, the central character is an attractively unbridled young man of fierce temper and unrestrained sexuality who pursues true love through contemporary Britain in a sequence of scandalous and hilarious adventures. Published in the mid-18th century, Tom Jones is a classic English novel that captures the spirit of its age and whose famous characters – Squire Western, the chaplain Thwackum, the scheming Blifil, seductive Molly Seagrim and Sophia, Tom's true love – have come to represent Augustan society in all its loquacious, turbulent, comic variety.

Tom Jones (video)

Joseph Andrews. Fielding’s Joseph Andrews was published anonymously in 1742. Described on the title page as “Written in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes, author of Don Quixote,” it begins as a burlesque of Pamela, with Joseph, Pamela’s virtuous footman brother, resisting the attempts of a highborn lady to seduce him. The parodic intention soon becomes secondary, and the novel develops into a masterpiece of sustained irony and social criticism, with, at its centre, Parson Adams, one of the great comic figures of literature and a striking confirmation of the contention of the 19th-century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky that the positively good man can be made convincing in fiction only if rendered to some extent ridiculous. F

Joseph Andrews (video)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ef. OBL_-xkoc

The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon. In the following June, Fielding set out for Portugal to seek the sun, writing an account of his journey, The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon. This work presents an extraordinarily vivid picture of the tortuous slowness of 18th-century sea travel, the horrors of contemporary medicine, the caprices of arbitrary power as seen in the conduct of customs officers and other petty officials, and, above all, his indomitable courage and cheerfulness when almost completely helpless, for he could scarcely walk and had to be carried on and off ship.

Fielding landed at Lisbon on Aug. 7, 1754. He died in October and was buried in the British cemetery at Lisbon.

Sir Walter Scott called Henry Fielding the “father of the English novel,” and the phrase still indicates Fielding’s place in the history of literature. Though not actually the first English novelist, he was the first to approach the genre with a fully worked-out theory of the novel; and in Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, and Amelia, which a modern critic has called comic epic, epic comedy, and domestic epic, respectively, he had established the tradition of a realism presented in panoramic surveys of contemporary society that dominated English fiction until the end of the 19th century.