The little white attic

1/ I can see why Coleridge thinks Tom Jones has one of the most perfect plots in literature, alongside Oedipus Tyrannus by Sophocles and T...

1/ One of the readers of this blog, who prefers Richardson to Fielding, once said he thought Tom Jones was… cute. I don’t agree. Tom Jones ...

1/ Once I came across a review of Tom Jones  that complained of Henry Fielding’s “relentless flow of words”. But I love that about Fielding!...

1/ I like the sexual frankness of Tom Jones .  “… Nor was her mind more effeminate than her person. As this was tall and robust, so was that...

I’ve noted that some bloggers complain about the narrator of Tom Jones —why?—this is one of the great charms of the novel.    “The same anim...

1/ I’m taking back my comment earlier that Arabella’s ridiculous but lovable.  “… You are a foolish Wench! replied Arabella, smiling at [Luc...

1/ Evelina, her mother dead and her father not acknowledging her, has been raised by Rev. Arthur Villars in the country. She is now 17 and L...

1/ Now that I have got acquainted with the fathers of the English novel (Richardson and Fielding), it’s natural that I get to know the mothe...

(Drawing of Parson Adams, by Thomas Rowlandson)  1/ In an earlier blog post, I wrote that Joseph Andrews , like Vanity Fair over a century l...

As I wrote in the earlier blog post about Joseph Andrews , Henry Fielding takes from Don Quixote the picaresque form: two—and later three—c...

Hello friends, fans, and foes, I have just returned from Berlin. Joseph Andrews and Parson Adams were my companions on the work trip. Let’s ...

In September, I read Moments of Reprieve , my third Primo Levi book after If This Is a Man (aka Survival in Auschwitz ) and The Truce (a...