A Jonathan Wild Bibliography


All of the biographies of Fielding listed by David Nokes in his Penguin edition of Jonathan Wild are replaced, supplemented or denounced by Martin C. Battestin, with Ruthe R. Battestin, Henry Fielding, A Life (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), which is in turn supplemented and denounced but not replaced by Ronald Paulson, The Life of Henry Fielding (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). The Battestin biography is thoroughly researched and readably written but engages in occasional unsound speculations about both the life and the work; Paulson treats the biographical material through chronologies that precede each chapter, followed by a topical treatment that is somewhat fragmentary but makes valuable connections and comments. Volume III of Fielding's Miscellanies, in which Jonathan Wild first appeared, has been published in the standard Wesleyan edition of Fielding (1997), with an introductions by Hugh Amory and Bertrand Goldgar; the Wesleyan edition is based on the first edition of Jonathan Wild, which is different in important respects from the second edition used for the Penguin text. Many studies of Fielding's novels studiously avoid dealing with Jonathan Wild, but discussions of it (in addition to those listed by Nokes) can be found in Ian A. Bell, Henry Fielding: Authorship and Authority (London: Longmans, 1994), pp. 144-64, and in Michael Irwin, Henry Fielding: The Tentative Realist (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), pp. 44-49. In addition, several articles or book chapters have appeared since Nokes's edition, and they are listed below.

Baird, John D. "Criminal Elements: Fielding's Jonathan Wild." In Rough Justice: Essays on Crime in Literature, ed. M. L. Friedland (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991): 76-94.

Bogel, Fredric V. Fielding's Jonathan Wild: Doing Violence to Certain Words," in his The Difference Satire Makes: Rhetoric and Reading from Jonson to Byron (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 150-88. [On irony and authorial authority.]

Campbell, Jill. "Fielding and the Novel at Mid-Century," in The Columbia History of the British Novel, ed. John Richetti, et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994): 102-26.

Goldgar, Bertrand A. "The Champion and the Chapter on Hats in Jonathan Wild. Philological Quarterly 72.4 (Fall, 1994): 443-50. [Connects partisanship in Jonathan Wild with Fielding's political journal.]

---.  "Jonathan Wild."  In Rivero, pp. 35-56.  [Reprints the "General Introduction" to Miscellanies by Henry Fielding, Vol. 3.]

Pettit, Alexander. "What Drama does in Fielding's Jonathan Wild." Eighteenth-Century Fiction 6.2 (January 1994): 153-68.  [Rpt. in Rivero, pp. 21-34.]

Rivero, Albert J., ed.  Critical Essays on Henry Fielding.  New York: G. K. Hall, 1998.  [Previously published essays; see especially Pettit and Goldgar.]

Ruml, Treadwell, II. "Jonathan Wild and the Epistemological Gulf between Vice and Virtue." Studies in the Novel 21.2 (Summer 1989): 117-27.

Shortland, Michael. "Setting Murderous Machiavel to School: Hypocrisy in Politics and the Novel." Journal of European Studies 18.2 (June 1988): 93-119.

Swanson, Gayle R. "Henry Fielding and 'a Certain Wooden Edifice' Called the Gallows." In Executions and the British Experience form the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century: A Collection of Essays, ed. William B. Thesing (North Carolina: McFarland, 1990): 45-57.

Thompson, James. "Patterns of Property and Possession in Fielding's Fiction." Eighteenth-Century Fiction 3.1 (October 1990): 21-42.

Tytler, Graeme. "Letters of Recommendation and False Vizors: Physiognomy in the Novels of Henry Fielding." Eighteenth-Century Fiction 2.2 (January 1990): 93-111.

Wilputte, Earla A. "The Autodiagetic Power of Mrs. Heartfree on Henry Fielding's Jonathan Wild." Durham University Journal 53.2 (July 1992): 229-34.

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