ABSTRACT
Those familiar with the history of the modern European novel will know that one of the factors which essentially determined its development was, through into the nineteenth century, the critical treatment given in the realistic novel to the idealized world presented in medieval and baroque romances of chivalry and heroic-gallant tales. The clash is tangible as early as the sixteenth century with the birth of the picaresque novel and its new type of anti-hero, and is particularly evident in the first great novel of modern European literature, Cervantes’ Don Quixote: in this, chivalric ideals are confronted with the harsh realities of life. Another author, one who can similarly be said to belong to the vanguard of the modern European novel, found his way to realistic representation in the course of a composition which was intended at the outset as a parody on the idealistic novel; the contrasting world created for this purpose then gradually became itself the focus of the writer’s interest. Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742) begins as a parody of the idealistic virtue and morality propagated in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, but adheres as the story progresses more and more to the motto stated in the preface: the work being of a new kind, a ‘comic epic-poem in prose’, it must present not an ideal (‘unreal’) world, but one ‘true to nature’.
