The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling in the context of "Character (arts)"

⭐ In the context of Character_(arts), *The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling* is significant because it


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⭐ Core Definition: The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling

The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, often known simply as Tom Jones, is a comic novel by English playwright and novelist Henry Fielding. It is a Bildungsroman and a picaresque novel. It was first published on 28 February 1749 in London and is among the earliest English works to be classified as a novel. It is the earliest novel mentioned by W. Somerset Maugham in his 1948 book Great Novelists and Their Novels, in which Maugham ranks the ten best novels of the world.

The novel is highly organised despite its length. Samuel Taylor Coleridge argued that it has one of the "three most perfect plots ever planned", alongside Oedipus Rex by Sophocles and The Alchemist by Ben Jonson. It became a best-seller, with four editions published in its first year alone. It is generally regarded as Fielding's greatest book and as an influential English novel.

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👉 The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling in the context of Character (arts)

In fiction, a character is a person or being in a narrative (such as a novel, play or film). The character may be entirely fictional or based on a real-life person, in which case the distinction of a "fictional" versus "real" character may be made. Derived from the Ancient Greek word χαραÎșÏ„ÎźÏ, the English word dates from the Restoration, although it became widely used after its appearance in Tom Jones by Henry Fielding in 1749. From this, the sense of "a part played by an actor" developed. (Before this development, the term dramatis personae, naturalized in English from Latin and meaning "masks of the drama", encapsulated the notion of characters from the literal aspect of masks.) A character, particularly when enacted by an actor in the theater or cinema, involves "the illusion of being a human person". In literature, characters guide readers through their stories, helping them to understand plots and ponder themes. Since the end of the 18th century, the phrase "in character" has been used to describe an effective impersonation by an actor. Since the 19th century, the art of creating characters, as practiced by actors or writers, has been called characterization.

A character who stands as a representative of a particular class or group of people is known as a type. Types include both stock characters and those that are more fully individualized. The characters in Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler (1891) and August Strindberg's Miss Julie (1888), for example, are representative of specific positions in the social relations of class and gender, such that the conflicts between the characters reveal ideological conflicts.

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The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling in the context of Henry Fielding

Henry Fielding (22 April 1707 – 8 October 1754) was an English writer and judge 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.

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The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling in the context of The Sot-Weed Factor (1960 novel)

The Sot-Weed Factor is a 1960 novel by the American writer John Barth. The novel marks the beginning of Barth's literary postmodernism. The Sot-Weed Factor takes its title from the poem The Sot-Weed Factor: Or, a Voyage to Maryland. A Satyr (1708) by the English-born poet Ebenezer Cooke (c. 1665 – c. 1732), about whom few biographical details are known.

A satirical epic set in the 1680s–90s in London and colonial Maryland, the novel tells of a fictionalized Ebenezer Cooke, who is given the title "Poet Laureate of Maryland" by Charles Calvert, 3rd Baron Baltimore and commissioned to write a Marylandiad to sing the praises of the colony. He undergoes adventures on his journey to and within Maryland while striving to preserve his virginity. The complicated Tom Jones–like plot is interwoven with numerous digressions and stories-within-stories, and is written in a style patterned on the writing of 18th-century novelists such as Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and Tobias Smollett.

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The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling in the context of Ten Novels and Their Authors

Ten Novels and Their Authors (originally published as Great Novelists and Their Novels) is a 1948 work of literary criticism by William Somerset Maugham. Maugham collects together what he considers to have been the ten greatest novels and writes about the books and the authors. The ten novels are:

  1. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling by Henry Fielding (1749)
  2. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813)
  3. The Red and the Black by Stendhal (1830)
  4. Le PÚre Goriot by Honoré de Balzac (1835)
  5. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1849)
  6. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (1856)
  7. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851)
  8. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)
  9. The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky (1880)
  10. War and Peace by Tolstoy (1869)

This book was originally a series of magazine articles commissioned by Redbook.

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LINKED FROM (PARENTS)
← Character (arts) ← Fictional character ← Flat character ← Henry Fielding ← The Sot-Weed Factor (1960 novel) ← Ten Novels and Their Authors ← Dynamic character
LINKS TO (CHILDREN)
Henry Fielding → Bildungsroman → Picaresque novel → W. Somerset Maugham → Ten Novels and Their Authors → Samuel Taylor Coleridge → Oedipus Rex → Sophocles → The Alchemist (play) → Ben Jonson →