Crossing Cultural Borders, Mingling Generic Categories: Henry Fielding’s ‘Comic Romance’; or, the ‘Veiled’ Rise of the English Novel
Crossing Cultural Borders, Mingling Generic Categories: Henry Fielding’s ‘Comic Romance’; or, the ‘Veiled’ Rise of the English Novel

Summary/Abstract: The paper investigates Henry Fielding’s writing in ‘the Manner of Cervantes,’ as he declares in the preface to Joseph Andrews (1742), in order to produce what I call a ‘productive tautology’ consisting of romance qua genre and Quixotism as forma mentis. The juxtaposition of romance and Quixotism encapsulates Fielding’s genuine recipe for writing – and thus implementing – a ‘new species of writing’ called ‘comic romance’; or what we now call a novel. As a result, the new kind of romance is predetermined by the comic essence of both the sympathetic laughter ‘into the World’ and of good nature, the basic Quixotic moral quality which underlies Fielding’s own moral views. The mingling together of a comic form of romance with comic substance (rehabilitating laughter) accounts for the ideological importance of Fielding’s Whiggish aestheticisation of laughter that elevated Cervantes’s Don Quixote to the status of a character transplanted on the stage of classic modernity.

• Details
• Contents