Joseph Andrews

With zest, style and humour, Henry Fielding unfolds this curiously moral tale. With Shamela, published in 1741, Fielding set about exposing, by brilliant parody, the more vulnerable aspects of Samuel Richardson's phenomenally successful Pamela. In the following year he offered, quite deliberately, his own alternative conception of the art and purpose of the novel: Joseph Andrews achieved an immediate popularity. The story of Joseph's dogged determination, against all odds, to cling to his virtue is almost incidental in one of the richest, sanest, funniest and most attractive novels in the language. Drawn, as Fielding says, in imitation of Cervantes, its Don Quixote is the unforgettable Parson Adams - the unique embodiment of a vigorous, innocent and rational enjoyment of life and the first great comic character in English fiction.