Joseph Andrews

Text:
Bibliomania edition

Quotes:

• "A comic romance is a comic epic poem in prose." (H. Fielding, from the "Preface" to Joseph Andrews)
  
• "Life everywhere furnishes an accurate observer with the ridiculous." (ibid.)
• "The Monstrous is much easier to paint than describe, and the Ridiculous to describe than to paint." (ibid.)
• "It hath been thought a vast commendation of a painter to say his figures seem to breathe; but surely it is a much greater and nobler applause, that they appear to think." (ibid.)
• "To discover any one to be the exact reverse of what he affects, is more surprising, and consequently more ridiculous, than to find him a little deficient in the quality he desires the reputation of." (ibid.) --> showing hypocrisy in action is better for achieving the effect of the ridiculous than revealing somebody's vanity.
• "Great vices are the proper objects of our detestation, smaller faults, of our pity; but affectation appears to me the only true source of the Ridiculous." (ibid.)
  

Contexts:

• a wiki article
• dmoz links on Fielding

Terms:
comic epic in prose; picaresque; Bildungsroman; novel of the road; intrusive narrator; digressions; the ridiculous; burlesque.