This thesis, entitled "Too Fond to Be Here Related": Ironic Didacticism and the Moral Analogy in Henry Fielding's "Amelia" (1751), opens by exploring the current and historical critical reception of Fielding's final extended work of fiction. In an effort to explain Amelia's "failure"---the prevailing assessment among even its more sympathetic critics---I then argue that this experimental novel offers an innovative engagement with David Hume's moral philosophy. The emerging analogy provides a fascinating but previously neglected departure from Samuel Richardson's means of providing moral instruction through a sentimental appeal to upholding a specific social contract; Fielding's unsteady narrator and provocative paradoxical treatment of the novel's protagonists invite us to appreciate the link between Amelia and the progressive social protest novels of the later eighteenth century.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.28249 |
| Date | January 1997 |
| Creators | Budd, Adam. |
| Contributors | Hensley, David C. (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Arts (Department of English.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001609536, proquestno: MQ43839, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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