How Samuel Taylor Coleridge Suspended Henry Fielding’s Disbelief

This article argues that Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous statement on the willing suspension of disbelief was borrowed from Henry Fielding’s novels Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones. Coleridge adapted Fielding’s view of fiction as a hypothetical space for interrogating the foundations of knowledge. He adopts a dilemma in Fielding’s fiction between the willing suspension of disbelief as a form of knowledge, and the notion, derived from Samuel Richardson, that aesthetic experience suspends the will. The result is a contradictory concept of the will as both present and absent in aesthetic experience, implicit in Fielding’s fictions and accentuated in Coleridge’s literary theory.