Joseph Andrews

The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams, was the first full-length novel by the English author Henry Fielding to be published and among the early novels in the English language. Appearing in 1742 and defined by Fielding as a "comic epic poem in prose", it tells of a good-natured footman's adventures on the road home from London with his friend and mentor, the absent-minded parson Abraham Adams. Inspirations The novel embodies a fusion of two competing aesthetics of 18th-century literature: the mock-heroic and neoclassical (and, by extension, aristocratic) approach of Augustans such as Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, and the popular, domestic prose fiction of novelists such as Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson. The novel draws on various inspirations. Written "in imitation of the manner of Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote" (see title page on right), the work owes much of its humour to the techniques developed by Cervantes, and its subject-matter to the seemingly loose arrangement of events, digressions and lower-class characters to the genre of writing known as picaresque. In deference to the literary tastes and recurring tropes of the period, it relies on bawdy humour, an impending marriage and a mystery surrounding unknown parentage, but conversely is rich in philosophical digressions, classical erudition and social purpose. Background Fielding's first venture into prose fiction came a year previously with the publication in pamphlet form of Shamela, a travesty of the stylistic failings and moral hypocrisy that Fielding saw in Richardson's Pamela and a direct response to them. Richardson's epistolary tale of a resolute servant girl, armed only with her "virtue", battling against her master's attempts at seduction had become an overnight literary sensation in 1741. The implicit moral message—that a girl's chastity has eventual value as a commodity—and the awkwardness of the epistolary form in dealing with ongoing events, along with the triviality of the detail which the form necessitates, were some of the main targets of Fielding's parody.