Tom Jones and the Odyssey
Bruce Stovel, University of Alberta
Volume 1, no. 4, July 1989
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
Fielding stresses throughout Tom Jones that in it he is “the Founder of a new Province of Writing.” At one point, in the manner of Polonius, he calls this new literary kind “Prosai-comi-epic Writing” (V, 1, 209). Whether or not Fielding was literally trying to create a novel that would at the same time be a modern epic (as Tolstoy and Joyce would later attempt to write), he certainly wanted to give his innovative comic novel the monumental dignity and mythic universality of the great epic poems. And whenever Fielding refers to serious epic he has in mind primarily three poets: Homer, Virgil, and Milton … Not only were these three epic poets the ones Fielding knew best and admired most; even more important, like Alexander Pope in his mock epics, he could count on his educated readers to recognize allusions to their poems.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Henry Fielding” include:
Henry Fielding Reinvents the Afterlife
by REGINA M. JANES (ECF 23.3, Spring 2011)
La Place’s Histoire de Tom Jones, ou l’enfant trouvé and Candide
by E.M. LANGILLE (ECF 19.3, Spring 2007)
Social Rank, “The Rise of the Novel,” and Whig Histories of Eighteenth-Century Fiction
by NICHOLAS HUDSON (ECF 17.4, July 2005)
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