SOURCE: "Fielding the Anti-Romanticist," in his Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England, Yale University Press, 1967, pp. 100-31.

In the following chapter from his book-length study Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England, Paulson argues that the works of Fielding represent a transition between satire and the early English novel. Focusing mainly on Joseph Andrews, Paulson discusses Fielding's subversions of the romance genre and his disagreement with Samuel Richardson's Pamela.

Fielding vs. Richardson

In the context of his earlier work it would appear that when Fielding came to write the first of his novels his intention was to correct the unhealthy tendencies of the Richardsonian novel in the same spirit in which he had earlier corrected the excesses of the pantomimes and operas. Pamela (1740), in one sense, represented the culmination of the forces of bad writing and fraudulent morality that Swift had attacked in A Tale of a...