/lit/ - Literature

>>12501815
Your question begins to unearth some of the quite questionable soil upon which lit is built. Rarely is there a mention of Fielding or Defoe, and when there are they are lacking all depth of thought. Unfortunately, these aren't the only great authors that this board disrespects. A shame really. It's why I can only ever come here when I'm terminally bored

>>12501856
pre-19th century authors who aren't Shakespeare or Homer rarely get discussed regularly on /lit/.

>>12501815
He's under discussed but not underrated. If one undertakes a thread that balks at initiating some viable point of discussion then it should be less than surprising that next to no one responds.
Love Fielding? Prove it.

>>12501815
I’ve read a bit of Defoe, but where do I start with this guy?

>>12504298
I'd start with Journal of the Plague Year- truly a great, brief book.

Fielding is superb. Tom Jones has a good shout at being the greatest English novel, so bawdy and funny, yet still deeply intellectual with profound insight. Aways impresses me when his seemingly random picaresque plot slowly dovetails perfectly at the end.
All 18th century lit is underrated here. I think in Britain at least it was a better period than the 19th. I much prefer the wit of Fielding, Defoe, Smollett, Sterne, Goldsmith to all those ponderous Victorians

Bump

>>12504550
Also Frances Burney and Samuel Richardson.
I love the playful postmodern aspects of that era, with the writer breaking the fourth wall, the different layers of fiction they use.

>>12504373
That's Defoe idiot

>>12506068
Anon...
The question answered concerned DeFoe..

>>12507134
Actually it's ambiguous
But it probably is Fielding.
No need for a tiff.

>>12501815
Tom Jones was so damn good, I really loved Partridge for all his flaws - excited to read Joseph Andrews after Shamela.
Any niche smartypants on /lit/ that have ventured into Sarah Fielding’s writing?

>>12504298
If Fielding, start with Joseph Andrews, m8.

>>12509090
read it as a kid. at some point a character becomes stunned for whatever reason and Fielding describes his character as having become 'the statue of surprise.' What follows is a longish paragraph as to what such a representative statue would look like.. very funny. After 15 years that's what remains of JA in my old becoming memory.

Was he a cuck? This whole book is basically the Merry daughter pasta in novel form

>>12507213
Wrong

>Hushed be every ruder breath. May the heathen ruler of the winds confine in iron chains the boisterous limbs of noisy Boreas, and the sharp-pointed nose of bitter-biting Eurus. Do thou, sweet Zephyrus, rising from thy fragrant bed, mount the western sky, and lead on those delicious gales, the charms of which call forth the lovely Flora from her chamber, perfumed with pearly dews, when on the 1st of June, her birth-day, the blooming maid, in loose attire, gently trips it over the verdant mead, where every flower rises to do her homage, till the whole field becomes enamelled, and colours contend with sweets which shall ravish her most.
>So charming may she now appear! and you the feathered choristers of nature, whose sweetest notes not even Handel can excell, tune your melodious throats to celebrate her appearance. From love proceeds your music, and to love it returns. Awaken therefore that gentle passion in every swain: for lo! adorned with all the charms in which nature can array her; bedecked with beauty, youth, sprightliness, innocence, modesty, and tenderness, breathing sweetness from her rosy lips, and darting brightness from her sparkling eyes, the lovely Sophia comes!

>>12509109
It has the virtue of being tiny, plus T. S. Eliot quotes from it, or refers to less than obliquely in Wasteland.
There's a lot about Goldsmith in Boswell's Life of Johnson. Brilliant but ugly and horribly awkward socially, both Johnson and Boswell liked him very much. Maybe as close to the typical /lit/ poster as the 18th c. affords.

>>12501815
I've nearly finished Tom Jones and I think it's the best novel I've ever read.