A Film Canon

Seguing Shamela into the ancillary narrative of Pamela's younger brother, Joseph Andrews attempts to formulate an alternative language from Richardson's to describe the increasingly fluid cusp between "the lower class of the gentry, and the higher of the mercantile world...the worst-bred part of mankind." To some extent, this language is pointedly regressive, fusing the picaresque tradition of the previous century, and the mock-heroic tradition of the previous literary generation, into a sustained attack on vernacular letters, replete with comic misspellings, misquotations and misunderstandings of the classical curriculum. Nevertheless, Fielding simultaneously outlines a more self-consciously original project, purporting to compensate for both Homer's missing comic epic, and the lineage it might have produced, by way of a narrativsed taxonomy of polite affectations that supervenes the more general satirical imperative; or, rather, transfers it from an economic to an epistemological register. As a result, the most delightful comic sequences are those in which the conventions governing the distribution and recognition of erudition are themselves explicated and rendered idiotic, usually with the aid of the irascible Parson Adams, who accompanies the protagonist on the short country trip that effectively constitutes the narrative - a micro-topography that is thrown into proportionately violent relief, generally as the result of some small discrepancy or disagreement over money that balloons into one of Fielding's trademark plastic, complicated, Hogarthian action sequences.