Note: Amelia is available at the special sale price of $19.95 for 2013. We're confident that those who give Broadview books a try on the basis of an exceptional price will stay with Broadview on the basis of the quality of our publications.

With its combination of satire and sentiment, its focus on the seedy side of London life, and its unexpected shifts in tone, Amelia has intrigued and disturbed readers since its first publication. Eagerly awaited by Henry Fielding's eighteenth-century readers of Tom Jones, the novel perplexed many of them. Amelia counters the traditional courtship plot of eighteenth-century novels with its convincing portrayal of a marriage between an errant husband and his wife, and is ahead of its time in its depiction of the alienation of modern city life.

Appendices include contemporary criticism and related works by Alexander Pope and Sarah Fielding.

Comments:

"Henry Fielding called Amelia his 'favourite Child' but the readers who loved Tom Jones, on the lookout for more jokes from this author, found the child unfunny and refused to take her in. Linda Bree's new edition of the novel creates an important opening for fresh appraisal of this innovative and challenging work. It is generously and lucidly annotated, with a discriminating introduction taking balanced account both of the historical context and most recent critical discourse. A superb addition to our resources for the study of the early modern novel as well as of Fielding." – Thomas Lockwood, University of Washington

"Amelia, Fielding's last and in some ways greatest novel, gives us marriage as epic adventure, fraught with perils and blessed with pleasures, and Linda Bree thankfully gives us a new and authoritative edition. The text is well edited and annotated, Bree's introduction superb, and the maps, glossary, and appendices all very useful." – Adam Potkay, William R. Kenan Professor of Humanities, The College of William & Mary

Linda Bree is Editorial Director, Arts and Literature at the Cambridge University Press. She has published widely on eighteenth-century literature and is the editor of the Broadview Edition of Jane Austen's Persuasion.

Academics please note that this is a title classified as having a restricted allocation of complimentary copies. While the availability of bound complimentary copies is restricted to desk copies only, electronic complimentary copies are readily available for those professors wishing to consider this title for possible course adoption. Should you choose to adopt the book after viewing an electronic copy we will be happy to provide a bound desk copy.

Table of Contents: [Back to Top]

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Henry Fielding: A Brief Chronology

A Note on the Text

Amelia

Appendix A: From Alexander Pope, "Essay on Man"

Appendix B: Samuel Johnson: The Rambler, no. 4

Appendix C: From Covent-Garden Journal

Appendix D: "The History of Mrs Bilson", from Sarah Fielding, The Countess of Dellwyn

Select Bibliography