Secular Fielding

This essay recoversthe sophistication of Henry Fielding's approach to characterand the elasticity of religious thought it signals. Fielding's writings, especially Tom Jones and Amelia, enact through their methods of characterization the unbinding of singular doctrinal orthodoxy. Religion, for Fielding, corresponds to a field of possibilities that must be prioritized and rearranged continually, according to the shifting terrain of fallenness. Attending to the complexity of Fielding's characters reveals secularism before its counter-codification as normative liberal sociality. But it also clarifies the ways in which the conceptual grammar of progressive secularization persists in shaping histories of the novel.