Fielding�s �Amelia�. Thematic Plurality of the Novel

Article deals with the attempt to describe the semantic apacity of Fielding`s last novel Amelia that became the notable event in writers biography and remains the object of discussion among the researches starting from its first publication. Fielding was at the height of his fame as the magistrate for Westminster and Middlesex and as a celebrated novelist who was an opponent of Samuel Richardson. His novel Tom Jones (1749) despite some harsh criticism had been generally acclaimed. According to the title Amelia obviously differs from Fieldings early novels: Joseph Andrews, Jonathan Wild and Tom Jones. With his central heroine Fielding has entered the territory associated with Richardson, whose distressed female characters, Pamela and Clarissa, had captured the attention of the reading public. It is well-known that Amelia Booth was modelled on Fieldings first wife, Charlotte Craddock, while his hero, Captain Booth, was inspired be the author himself as well as his father, Lieutenant General Edmund Fielding. Trying to defend Amelia Fielding in the Covent-Garden Journal insists that he has followed the rules for the epic of Homer and Virgil, saying that the learned reader will see that the latter was the noble model. Like the Aeneid, Amelia consists of twelve books, and the opening section of the novel, set in Newgate, is a parallel to Virgil. The author being in the heyday of his glory brought before the public his new, experimental text, giving up the form of comic epic poem in prose that was immortalized in The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. Denying the technique that was deeply rooted in the English prose due to the narrative skill and the omniscient author (who acted as theorist of the novel), theatrically performing the game with the reader through metanarrative, Fielding in Amelia prefers restrained position of the narrator using the recourses of dramatical art. Choosing the plain plot about the everyday difficulties, poverty and humiliations of a young married couple that is peculiar for European sentimentalism, Fielding due to the thematic tightness of the novel, its allusive fullness, the ambiguity of characters, the poetics of concealment the narrative about the life of a libertine in a family (W. Scott) presents not so much as the moral lesson for the protagonist that is guided by passions but as ethical transformation that comes with the experience of the art of life. In recent decades Amelia has been the subject of many investigations, its experimental qualities made it attractive to critics of both the development of the 18th century novel and Fieldings career. Modern readers however, have shown less interest for the work. Critical hostility to Amelia often seems to imply disappointment that it is not like Tom Jones. Amelia is often called a sequel to his masterpiece Tom Jones (Walter Scott) but Fielding adopted a new form of verisimilitude and changed his narrative technique, setting and tone. Historians agree that Tom Jones is loosely an epic, with a plot drawn from romance, while Amelia is modelled on a classical epic Virgils Aeneid and effects to eschew romance (Martin Battestin, Claude Rawson, Peter Sabor, Ronald Paulson, Simon Varey). The instability of reputation of Fieldings Amelia demonstrates that the novel was traditionally estimated as writers failure but nowadays it is viewed as complicated literary form addressed to the highbrow reader. According to Peter Sabor, Amelia might never become the favourite Child of Fieldings readers, as it was of Fielding himself, but what remains convincing about his last and most problematic novel is its harsh, world-weary picture of a venal society. Fieldings darkened view of the peoples community influenced the later samples of the genre and reached successful treatment of the similar themes in the English novel of the 19th century. All the more it is the universal experience of the renewal of genre poetics and the reading of Amelia represents Fieldings original conception of the novel. According to the declared problem the author of the present article uses historical and literary, sociocultural and hermeneutic approaches in the synthesis with the technique of close reading.