Tom Jones

by HenryFielding (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1998

  $4.07

  Thought by Coleridge to have one of the greatest plots of all literature, TOM JONES (1749) is funny, scandalous and picaresque. It follows the adventures of Tom, from his childhood as a foundling reared by magnanimous Mr Allworthy to hisexploits as a lusty young man temporarily ensnared by the rich and amorous Lady Bellaston. For all his faults, of which a weakness for women is the most evident, and in spite of the machinations of his devious half-brother, Tom is loved by and loves the spirited Sophia. However, a series of comic misunderstandings and misadventures threatens to destroy any chance of happinessthese two might have together. TOM JONES is one of the first and most influential novels in the English language.

• Used

  Paperback
  1996

  $3.16

  Fielding's comic work of 1749 was immediately attacked as A motley history of bastardism, fornication, and adultery . Indeed, his populous novel overflows with a marvellous assortment of prudes, whores, libertines, bumpkins, misanthropes, hypocrites, scoundrels, virgins, and all too fallible humanitarians. At the centre of one of the most ingenious plots in English fiction stands a hero whose actions were, in 1749, as shocking as they are funny today. Expelled from Mr Allworthy's country estate for his wild temper and sexual conquests, the good-hearted foundling Tom Jones loses his money, joins the army, and pursues his beloved across Britain to London, where he becomes a kept lover and confronts the possibility of incest. Tom Jones is rightly regarded as Fielding's greatest work, and one of the first and most influential of English novels. This modernized edition is based on Fielding's emended fourth edition text and offers thorough notes, maps, and a bibliography. The introduction examines how Tom Jones exemplifies the role of the novel in the emerging eighteenth-century public sphere.

• Used

  Hardcover
  1988

  $3.16

• New

  Paperback
  1992

  $6.84

  Introduction and Notes by Doreen Roberts, Rutherford College, University of Kent at Canterbury. Tom Jones is widely regarded as one of the first and most influential English novels. It is certainly the funniest. Tom Jones, the hero of the book, is introduced to the reader as the ward of a liberal Somerset squire. Tom is a generous but slightly wild and feckless country boy with a weakness for young women. Misfortune, followed by many spirited adventures as he travels to London to seek his fortune, teach him a sort of wisdom to go with his essential good-heartedness. This 'comic, epic poem in prose' will make the modern reader laugh as much as it did his forbears. Its biting satire finds an echo in today's society, for as Doris Lessing recently remarked 'This country becomes every day more like the eighteenth century, full of thieves and adventurers, rogues and a robust, unhypocritical savagery side-by-side with people lecturing others on morality'.