ABSTRACT
The journey has long provided one of the dominant metaphors of literary discourse, and Fielding is evidently far from being the first author to exploit the language of travel in order to describe the narrative process. 1 An examination of the topology of Fielding's fiction reveals the precise influence a narrated journey may exert on the metaphors by which the idea of narrative is explored. Cervantes's fiction provides a good example of this phenomenon: as Hutchinson notes in his valuable study, 'land travel, especially walking, dominates Cervantes's imagery of narrative movement' in the Quijote, while the travel metaphors in the Galatea and Persiles γ Sigismunda generally and appropriately relate to the sea. 2 In order to determine the extent to which Fielding is original in his rhetorical approach, some of the claims of Hutchinson's thesis merit some preliminary consideration.
