A Film Canon

If the novel emerges as an argument for the affective and physiological power of 'sensibility', then Tom Jones stands as its first fully-fledged incarnation, teasing out the disparity between compassion and identification with an unprecedented rigor and acuity (at least for the medium), and deflecting the class cusp of Joseph Andrews into the vision of a society revolutionised by sympathy, and governed by the importance of marrying for love, to the extent that - at its most radical - love comes to effectively constitute and precede marriage.  Despite Fielding's claim that "I am writing a history, not a system", his most striking aesthetic gesture is the extraordinary systematicity with which this panorama of characters and situations is elaborated, combined with the casual, conversational register within which they are couched, extending to the comically discursive openings of each book, each of which outlines some issue facing the burgeoning novelist. Whereas Joseph Andrews felt pointedly regressive, Tom Jones is self-consciously original, commencing a hypothetical literary lineage, rather than concluding an imaginary one, and presenting the emergent middle-class sensibility as a naturalistic limit ("human nature") towards which its increasingly reticulated typage aspires, rather than a culmination of mock-heroic traditions.