Abstract

This essay considers Henry Fielding's 1749 novel Tom Jones in light of the rise of "atmosphere" as an aesthetic program within British literary fiction. Both in Fielding's own day and subsequently, from Hazlitt forward, criticism of Fielding's novel has drawn on metaphors of air and atmosphere. Engaging the history of Tom Jones's reception, the essay examines the ways that Fielding himself used the figure of air to build self-reflexive notional landscapes. This compositional strategy is indebted, on the one hand, to contemporary conceptions of the second sight (seeing things 'in the air') and, on the other, to early natural philosophy (seeing the air as if it were a thing). Both developed aesthetically charged vocabularies for describing 'the' atmosphere and reproducing it in writing. As it draws upon these two discourses, Tom Jones helps us to grasp a singularly elusive aspect of the eighteenth-century novel—an aspect which perhaps less contributed to the novel's 'rise' than rose from it to make lexical immersion in fiction count as an order of experience in its own right.

pdf

Share