Joseph Andrews

Joseph Andrews, in full The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of His Friend Mr. Abraham Adams, novel by Henry Fielding, published in 1742. It was written as a reaction against Samuel Richardson's novel Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740). Fielding portrayed Joseph Andrews as the brother of Pamela Andrews, the heroine of Richardson's novel.



Described on the title page as "Written in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes, author of Don Quixote," Joseph Andrews begins as a burlesque of Pamela, but the parodic intention of the novel soon becomes secondary, and it develops into a masterpiece of sustained irony and social criticism. At its centre is Parson Adams, one of the great comic figures of literature. Joseph and the parson have a series of adventures, in all of which they manage to expose the hypocrisy and affectation of others through their own innocence and guilelessness. (britannica.com)



About the author:

Henry Fielding (22 April 1707 - 8 October 1754) was an English writer and magistrate known for the use of humour and satire in his works. His 1749 comic novel The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling was a seminal work in the genre. Along with Samuel Richardson, Fielding is seen as the founder of the traditional English novel. He also played an important role in the history of law enforcement in the United Kingdom, using his authority as a magistrate to found the Bow Street Runners, London's first professional police force. (wikipedia.org)



Sir Walter Scott called Henry Fielding the "father of the English novel," and the phrase still indicates Fielding's place in the history of literature. Though not actually the first English novelist, he was the first to approach the genre with a fully worked-out theory of the novel; and in Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, and Amelia, which a modern critic has called comic epic, epic comedy, and domestic epic, respectively, he had established the tradition of a realism presented in panoramic surveys of contemporary society that dominated English fiction until the end of the 19th century. (britannica.com)