Jennifer Preston Wilson is Associate Professor at Appalachian State University, USA. She has published articles on ""Clarissa: The Nation Misrul'd"" (2003), ""`One has got all the goodness, and the other all the appearance of it': The Development of Darcy in Pride and Prejudice"" (2004), and ""On Honor and Consequences: The Duel in The Small House at Allington"" (2012). Elizabeth Kraft is Professor of English at the University of Georgia, USA. She is author of Character and Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Comic Fiction (1992), Laurence Sterne Revisited (1996), and Women Novelists and the Ethics of Desire 1684-1814 (2008). She has edited and co-edited works by Charlotte Smith, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and Samuel Richardson.
The works of Henry Fielding, though written nearly three hundred years ago, retain their sense of comedy and innovation in the face of tradition, and they easily engage the twenty-first-century student with many aspects of eighteenth-century life: travel, inns, masquerades, political and religious factions, the '45, prisons and the legal system, gender ideals and realities, social class. Part 1 of this volume, "Materials," discusses the available editions of Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, Shamela, Jonathan Wild, and Amelia; suggests useful critical and contextual works for teaching them; and recommends helpful audiovisual and electronic resources. The essays of part 2, "Approaches," demonstrate that many of the methods and models used for one novel-the romance tradition, Fielding's legal and journalistic writing, his techniques as a playwright, the ideas of Machiavelli-can be adapted to others.