Though written between 1761 and 1762, Oliver Goldsmith’s single novel, The Vicar of Wakefield, was not published until several years following its completion. As the story goes, Goldsmith, a hack writer ever in peril of imprisonment due to debts, pleaded… Read More ›
Henry Fielding received some criticism for romanticizing a common criminal in his novel The History of the Life of the Late Jonathan Wild the Great. Based on the career of a well-known criminal executed earlier in the 18th century, the… Read More ›
When Tobias Smollett published the last of his novels, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, he used the familiar epistolary novel form first made famous by Samuel Richardson. Five of his flat, predictable characters wrote letters that differed in their points… Read More ›
When Samuel Richardson began The History of Sir Charles Grandison, he had no plan other than to present a moral tale to counter the bawdy tone and content of Henry Fielding’s wildly popular The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling… Read More ›
Sarah Fielding described David Simple as a “moral romance.” The episodic novel took a timely approach to the romance genre, moving away from the traditional chivalric tales to a story based on codes of middle-class ideology. Modern critics note that… Read More ›
Henry Fielding’s (22 April 1707 – 8 October 1754) lasting achievements in prose fiction—in contrast to his passing fame as an essayist, dramatist, and judge—result from his development of critical theory and from his aesthetic success in the novels themselves…. Read More ›
The Spanish words picaresque and picaro achieved currency in Spain shortly after 1600. Today they are terms in literary criticism, sometimes misused because of the vague meaning attached to them. The revival of the genre in the twentieth century was… Read More ›
The detective story is a special branch of crime fiction that focuses attention on the examination of evidence that will lead to the solution of the mystery. The Oxford English Dictionary records the first printed use of the noun “detective”… Read More ›
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