Henry Fielding: A Bibliographical Note

1. Editions

    Professor Battestin's claim that the Wesleyan text (in its revised version) 'may be considered authoritative" (p. 988) is perhaps the kind of overstatement that editors ought not to make about their own editions. In fact, two editions published in Fielding's lifetime--the first and the fourth--have some claim to serve as the basis for a definitive edition. But either must be modified: the Wesleyan edition is based on the first edition but incorporates changes that Fielding made in revising his text for the fourth; the best edition based on the fourth, that of Sheridan Baker, corrects some of its typographical errors. Baker's edition contains some of the best critical essays on the novel (by Preston, Battestin, Crane, Empson, and Hilles especially); Battestin's edition has an extraordinary wealth of footnotes, but despite the real value of Battestin's notes, they tend to be slanted towards his own interpretation of the novel. A recent edition in the Oxford World Classics provides a good text, but without the notes of Battestin or the essays in Baker.

2. Biographies

    The very old (1918) biography by Wilbur L. Cross is now outdated; shorter, recent, and accessible but somewhat unoriginal biographies by Pat Rogers and Simon Varey can be used as introductions. Martin C. Battestin, with Ruthe R.Battestin, Henry Fielding, A Life (New York: Routledge, 1989) provides important new material and is now the standard life, but it is long, somewhat obscurely organized, and makes some questionable assertions about Fielding. See also Paulson' biography (under "recent studies").

3. Bibliographies 

Hahn, H. George.  Henry Fielding: An Annotated Bibliography. Metuchen, NJ and London: Scarecrow, 1979. 

Morrissey, Leroy J.  Henry Fielding: A Reference Guide. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1980.

 Stoler, John and Richard D. Fulton  Henry Fielding: An Annotated Bibliography of Twentieth-Century Criticism, 1900-1977.  New York and London: Garland, 1980. 

Stoler, John A.  "Henry Fielding: A Partly Annotated Bibliography of Criticism, 1978-1992.  Bulletin of Bibliography 50.2 (June 1993): 83-101.

Ronald Paulson, Fielding: A Collection of Critical Essay (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962) contains most of the most important earlier studies. Robert Alter, Fielding and the Nature of the Novel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968) is an excellent general critical study; Irvin Ehrenpreis's Fielding: Tom Jones (London: Edward Arnold, 1964) is an introduction for students serves that purpose very well; Bernard Harrison, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones: The Novelist as Moral Philosopher (Sussex, England: Sussex University Press, 1975) sets the novel in the context of eighteenth-century ethical thought, does some nice critical reading, and takes a balanced view of Fielding's ethical position in the novel; Sheldon Sacks, Fiction and the Shape of Belief is heavily indebted to the language and methods of the University of Chicago school of rhetorical criticism, but its opening efforts to distinguish novels from satires and apologues are useful and enduring, and it is an interesting and thoughtful discussion of how Fielding signals meaning and stimulates evaluation. Two essays on Tom Jones are unavoidable classics: R.S. Crane, "The Plot of Tom Jones," The Journal of General Education 20 (1950):112-130; and William Empson, "Tom Jones," Kenyon Review 20 (1958):217-249. Both are included in Baker's edition. I also have high regard for the treatment of Tom Jones in John Preston, The Created Self: The Reader's Role in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (London: Heinemann, 1970), also included in Baker. Thomas R. Cleary, R. Henry Fielding: Political Writer. (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred Laurier, 1984) is the best of several recent treatments of Fielding's politics. J. Paul Hunter, Occasional Form: Henry Fielding and the Chains of Circumstance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1975) sees Fielding as masquerader seeking his identity alternatively in the Classical-Augustan world and in the Modern one, partly (in Tom Jones) through the parody of various literary models. K. G. Simpson, Henry Fielding: Justice Observed (London: Vision: Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble. 1985) is a very uneven collection of essays by various authors; that of Morris Golden, on Fielding's politics, is a helpful introduction, and that of Mark Kinkead-Weekes, on Tom Jones, is excellent. Henry Fielding: The Critical Heritage, ed. Ronald Paulson and Thomas Lockwood (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969) provides valuable examples of early responses to Fielding's novels.

5. Recent Studies

Campbell, Jill. Natural Masques: Gender and Identity in Fielding's Plays and Masques. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. [Concentrates, in its treatment of Tom Jones, on the relationship between gender politics and the Jacobite rebellion, and compares the novel to Fielding's Jacobite's Journal. Jacobitism becomes a metaphor for arbitrary authority.]

Drake, George A. "Historical Space in the 'History of': Between Public and Private in Tom Jones." ELH 66.3 (Fall 1999): 707-37. [Despite its unfortunate title, this is a thoughtful treatment of various ideas of history, of representations of social spaces, and of theories of personal and social change in Tom Jones.]

Paulson, Ronald,. The Life of Henry Fielding. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2000. [Organized chronologically by chapters linked to important functions and accomplishments in Fielding's life. Each chapter begins with a detailed chronology, followed by somewhat random discussions of more-or-less relevant topics. The discussions are sometimes brilliant and usually quite informative, but they tend to be repetitive and disconnected.]

Potter, Tiffany. Georgian Libertinism and the Plays and Novels of Henry Fielding. Montreal: McGill University Presss, 1999. [Argues that Fielding's major masculine characters represent a "conflation of sensibility and libertinism." Tom's good-natured sexuality is set against such unsympathetic libertines as Lady Bellaston, the Old Man, Young Nightingale, and others. Those "who behave according to natural inclinations and good nature are rewarded."]

Rivero, Albert J., ed. Critical Essays on Henry Fielding. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998). [A collection of previously published essays from the 1980s and 1990s. Of particular relevance are Thompson on property in Fielding's novels, London on women in Tom Jones, Rothstein on narrative authority in Tom Jones, and (relevant in a different way) Knight on the failure of authority in Joseph Andrews.]

Smallwood, Angela. Fielding and the Woman Question: The Novels of Henry Fielding and Feminist Debate 1700-1750. New York: St. Martin's, 1989. [Argues that Fielding's novels, especially Tom Jones and Amelia, "are directed towards raising in their first readers a sharp awareness of the gendering of moral conduct." Sees the feminist tradition of Mary Astell as the source and benchmark for Fielding's treatment of women.]

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