Academic literature on the topic 'Fielding, Henry, 1707-1754 – Criticism and interpretation'

This study is an examination of Henry Fielding's attitude toward the uses and abuses of language in the four newspapers which he edited: The Champion (1739-40), The True Patriot (1745-46), The Jacobite's Journal (1747-48), The Covent Garden Journal (1752). This exploration begins with a consideration of Fielding's attitude toward the corrupting and corruptible word and the relationship which he saw between the corruption and decline in language and the corruption and decline in ethics and morality. It focuses on these four journals largely neglected by previous Fielding critics, searching them for references to language uses and abuses and for the social theory underlying these remarks. This study moreover traces and investigates Fielding's seventeenth-century philosophical forerunners-Thomas Hobbes, Bernard de Mandeville, Anthony Ashley Cooper Third Earl of Shaftesbury, John Locke--and their profound effect on Fielding's ethos and ethics in particular and on those of the eighteenth century in general. Locke is discussed in most detail because he directly shaped Fielding's attitude toward language.Because language is a major tool of certain learned professions, three chapters examine Fielding's position in his journals on the uses and abuses of language as related to three groups of professionals: the clergy, writers and critics, and lawyers and doctors.This study suggests further areas needing investigation: (1) critical editions of The Champion and The Covent Garden Journal, (2) a comparative study of Fielding's journalistic efforts with those of Addison, Steele, Defoe, and especially Swift, (3) an examination of Fielding's attitude toward women in the four journals, (4) an exploration of the philosophical relationship between Fielding and Locke, (5) a comparison of Fielding's theories of language and society with those of two modern linguistphilosophers--George Orwell and Walter Ong.Fielding attempted in his four journals to restore a language that he saw as fallen into corruption and abuse. Language, he thought, often becomes corrupt first; then the corruptions in society follow. Fielding's four journals provide particularly useful indications of how seriously he took language, how prevalent he found its abuses in the professions of mid-eighteenth-century England, and how he hoped through purifying language to reform society itself in his own time.<br>Department of English

This thesis examines representations of trust in selected British sentimental novels of the eighteenth century. It focuses principally on the manner in which sentimental prose fiction reflects and participates in the shift from premodern to modern formations of trust. Commenting on the nature of modern trust, Anthony Giddens claims that, with the move to modernity, trust relations in the intimate sphere become increasingly dependent on emotional mutuality, while trust in institutions becomes increasingly impersonal and disengaged from assessments of moral character.<br>My work explores this dual shift in three sentimental novels. It first analyzes Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) and contends that Richardson denies the concept of honor its epistemological role in practical deliberations. The denial of the epistemology of honor uncouples the mechanism of personal trust from assessments of role and role performance and thus makes the trust in persons in the intimate sphere less dependent on institutional forms of trust. To replace honor's role in the formation of trust, Richardson proposes that the sentiments can provide reliable grounds for trust in the intimate sphere. However, he denies the sentiments a role in the formation of an encompassing social trust among strangers and mere acquaintances. The thesis proceeds to read Henry Fielding's Amelia (1751). In order to argue that Fielding envisioned divergent grounds for trust relations, it maintains that Fielding considers trust relations in the intimate sphere and trust relations in public life as based on the sentiments and fair distribution respectively. To conclude, the thesis investigates Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) to uncover the manner in which Goldsmith distinguishes personal trust in the intimate sphere from general system trust, which Goldsmith ultimately envisions as an ontological trust in providence.