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Article: Reading at arm's length: Fielding's contract with the reader in 'Tom Jones.' (novel by English writer Henry Fielding)(Making Genre: Studies in the Novel or Something Like It, 1684-1762)
- Article from:
- Studies in the Novel
- Article date:
- June 22, 1998
- Author:
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Academic readers of Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749) have sensed in what John Richetti calls "its sustaining network of ironies" the hand of a self-assured author, directing readers through hermeneutic cruxes to an appreciation of the author's skill.(1) Readers are cast as vulnerable, challenged by a tricky text making strenuous hermeneutic demands. Such criticism attributes to Fielding a regime that restricts linear momentum. As Eric Rothstein observes: "What is one to say, about the freedom of the reader in a book that trains us to employ certain modes of reading-- irony, analogy--which are designed to lead us into error as well as knowledge?"(2) Other critics argue ...
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Article: Works of Henry Fielding: Tom Jones: ...
Monarch Notes;
700+ words
...Fielding, Henry Monarch Notes 01-01-1963 Tom Jones: Books 1 - 4 Book I The Birth Of The Hero And An Account ... of various events to our understanding of human nature. Tom Jones is divided into eighteen "Books," following the example ...
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