As a writer, businessman and magistrate, Henry Fielding was in a singular position to textualize eighteenth-century English cultural conditions and materially to author the text of his society. Not only did he extol employment, he co-owned an employment agency. Not only did he commit fictional criminals to paper, he committed actual criminals to prison. And he could and did commit actual criminals to prison and paper simultaneously. Henry Fielding at Work examines the intersections of Fielding's practice as magistrate, businessman, and writer, and explores the ways Fielding's experience in those capacities affected the conception, form and articulation of his final literary works.

The works of Henry Fielding, though written nearly three hundred years ago, retain their sense of comedy and innovation in the face of tradition, and they easily engage the twenty-first-century student with many aspects of eighteenth-century life: travel, inns, masquerades, political and religious factions, the '45, prisons and the legal system, gender ideals and realities, social class. Part 1 of this volume, "Materials," discusses the available editions of Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, Shamela, Jonathan Wild, and Amelia; suggests useful critical and contextual works for teaching them; and recommends helpful audiovisual and electronic resources. The essays of part 2, "Approaches," demonstrate that many of the methods and models used for one novel-- the romance tradition, Fielding's legal and journalistic writing, his techniques as a playwright, the ideas of Machiavelli-- can be adapted to others.

A disastrous error on the field sends five lives into a tailspin in this widely acclaimed tale about love, life, and baseball, praised by the New York Times as "wonderful...a novel that is every bit as entertaining as it is affecting." Named one of the year's best books by the New York Times, NPR, The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, Bloomberg, Kansas City Star, Richmond Times-Dispatch, and Time Out New York. At Westish College, a small school on the shore of Lake Michigan, baseball star Henry Skrimshander seems destined for big league stardom. But when a routine throw goes disastrously off course, the fates of five people are upended. Henry's fight against self-doubt threatens to ruin his future. College president Guert Affenlight, a longtime bachelor, has fallen unexpectedly and helplessly in love. Owen Dunne, Henry's gay roommate and teammate, becomes caught up in a dangerous affair. Mike Schwartz, the Harpooners' team captain and Henry's best friend, realizes he has guided Henry's career at the expense of his own. And Pella Affenlight, Guert's daughter, returns to Westish after escaping an ill-fated marriage, determined to start a new life. As the season counts down to its climactic final game, these five are forced to confront their deepest hopes, anxieties, and secrets. In the process they forge new bonds, and help one another find their true paths. Written with boundless intelligence and filled with the tenderness of youth, The Art of Fielding is an expansive, warmhearted novel about ambition and its limits, about family and friendship and love, and about commitment -- to oneself and to others. "First novels this complete and consuming come along very, very seldom." --Jonathan Franzen

A foundling of mysterious parentage brought up by Mr. Allworthy on his country estate, Tom Jones is deeply in love with the seemingly unattainable Sophia Western, the beautiful daughter of the neighboring squireathough he sometimes succumbs to the charms of the local girls. When Tom is banished to make his own fortune and Sophia follows him to London to escape an arranged marriage, the adventure begins. A vivid Hogarthian panorama of eighteenth-century life, spiced with danger and intrigue, bawdy exuberance and good-natured authorial interjections, "Tom Jones" is one of the greatest and most ambitious comic novels in English literature.