ABSTRACT
Fielding, as is well known, christened Joseph Andrews, in his Preface to that work, ‘a comic Epic-Poem in Prose’, thereby allying prose fiction as he conceived and executed it with honourable classical antecedents. The novel, like Crusoe, Tom Jones, and Johnson’s Rasselas, is tripartite, since its four books are so arranged that the first and last, largely static, frame two central books of picaresque movement. The novel reveals a more pervasive pattern of episode-parallelism which fills out the skeletal frame offered above. For example, soon after his dismissal, Joseph is robbed and stripped. The chapter also asks why Fielding should draw attention so deliberately and at such length to the division of his work ‘into Books Chapters’ as he does in Book II.
