Product Description

Tom Jones is rightly regarded as Fielding's greatest work, and one of the first and most influential of English novels. Attacked at the time as `A motley history of bastardism, fornication, and adultery', it overflows with a marvellous assortment of prudes, whores, libertines, bumpkins, misanthropes, hypocrites, scoundrels, virgins, and all too fallible humanitarians.

This carefully modernized edition is based on Fielding's emended fourth edition text and offers the most thorough notes, maps, and bibliography. The introduction uses the latest scholarship to examine how Tom Jones exemplifies the role of the novel in the emerging eighteenth-century public sphere.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #53518 in Books
• Published on: 1992-05-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 768 pages

Synopsis
This book includes an introduction and notes by Doreen Roberts, Rutherford College, University of Kent at Canterbury. "Tom Jones" is widely regarded as one of the first and most influential English novels. It is certainly the funniest. Tom Jones, the hero of the book, is introduced to the reader as the ward of a liberal Somerset squire. Tom is a generous but slightly wild and feckless country boy with a weakness for young women. Misfortune, followed by many spirited adventures as he travels to London to seek his fortune, teach him a sort of wisdom to go with his essential good-heartedness.

About the Author
John Bender is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He is author of Spenser and Literary Pictorialism and Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England, co-editor of The Ends of Rhetoric and Chronotypes: The Construction of Time, and associate editor of The Columbia History of the British Novel. Simon Stern is completing a study of
literary property and professional authorship in eighteenth-century England, focusing on Henry and Sarah Fielding.

Customer Reviews

Absolutely wonderful
I've just finished reading this classical masterpiece, and though while long, it has passed on those dark nights of winter fantastically! What can I say? It is funny, gripping and moving. I found Fielding grasped the human condition perfectly. How the most honourable and understanding of us can sometimes be prone to selfishness and deceit, while the vagabond in society, can, occasionally do someone a good turn. Poor Tom is one of the most cheerful, and warm people you'd ever want to meet, yet trouble seems to follow him everywhere. One of the most hideous of characters -Mr Western- should be the sort of man you'd be forgiven to holding nothing but contempt for, and yet his manner just made me laugh more than anybody - poor Sophie!

While it is a long book, the short chapters and satirical scenarios make the pages fly by. Just read it!

A masterpiece
"Tom Jones" is deservedly a classic in English literature. The book is sheer fun, bursting with hilarious scenes, and Tom himself is such an extremely likeable character you cannot help but sympathize with him. It's a feast from beginning to end, not least because of the beautiful language, and the incredible story-telling talent Fielding displays here for all of us to enjoy.

"Surely a man may speak truth with a smiling countenance!"
'Tom Jones' is one of those lucky few- a book whose length is comparable in extent to its reader's enjoyment. 'Tom Jones' is a wonderfully dark, elaborately comic and utterly compelling account of the experiences of a young man as he pursues love, honour and fortune across 18th-Century England. Unlike many other novels and plays regarded as 'comic classics', Tom Jones is also genuinely funny. Seriously.

'Tom Jones' is enjoyable in and of itself- the characters and adventures are accessible, entertaining and varied. Despite this, one of the most interesting aspects of the novel is the introductory chapters to the novel's 18 'books'- short, usually amusing essays concerning theoretical aspects involved in the book. If you're pushed for time, you can skip them- but, much like the comic acts in certain Shakespeare plays, some of the best moments in the novel are contained in what can appear unneccessary literary 'padding'.

So don't be put off by its length, its age, its love for diversions and its complicated web of human relationships; Tom Jones is simply a fantastic read. Particularly for anyone acquainted with the historical environment the novel was written in, Tom Jones can be read as a satire on the hypocrisy of notions of honour; the scathing attack on those who marry for fortune rather than love has a peculiarly appealing modern resonance.

In the end, what's most revealing about Tom Jones is not how far the novel as a form has developed, but how little societal trends change over time. Fielding's world is one in which treachery and deceit are frequently the motives for acts of apparent benevolence, a world as hilarious as it is dangerous. If you've got a couple of weeks to spare, and a patient disposition, you could do a lot worse than to give 'Tom Jones' a try- for this price, you'd have to have a pretty good excuse not to!