Connect With English - Conversation - Books 1-4 - Instructor's Manual

However, as I have already briefly noted, Fielding's own stance toward satire is a complex one, and his view of satire's powers becomes increasingly dark in the course of his novel-and essay-writing career. Further, while Richardson's first novel draws on the native English traditions of spiritual autobiography, model-letter books, and conduct manuals, Fielding, in his preface to Joseph Andrews and elsewhere, explicitly declares the generic roots of his own novels in the tradition of classical epic. When Richardson and Fielding adopt these distinct generic lineages for their novels, they strike quite different stances toward recent developments in literary history-and in social history as well. The classical heritage Fielding invokes was made available to him through the traditional education he received as an upper-class boy; Richardson was well schooled instead in the growing body of literature, largely didactic or religious in nature, written in English for the aspiring middle class. More broadly, the classical epics so valued by the Augustans contain an image of male heroism, located in a world of militaristic values, that many of the newer works of mid-eighteenth-centuryEngland, often focused on female virtue and located in a world of domestic relations, did not honor ...»