Historiography, the Novel, and Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews

While many critics read Joseph Andrews as a response to Samuel Richardson's Pamela, this essay argues that Henry Fielding's "comic Epic-Poem in Prose" is as deeply concerned with the current state of historiography as it is with the development of the novel. Just as Fielding's narrator ridicules the prevailing vogue for intimate, detailed fiction over grand epic narrative, so he attacks the shift from a neoclassical style of historical writing to a modern style focused on the histories of ordinary men and individual private lives.