Tag Archives: Tom Jones

Fielding’s Satire Applied to the 1%

Fielding satiric attacks on the cheats of his day could apply to Wall Street financiers and other wealthy Americans who refuse to share.

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Life as a Stage Coach Ride

America is in many ways like the stage coach rides described by Samuel Johnson and Henry Fielding.

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Bloggers Confused Like Novelists of Old

Bloggers are facing confusion about rules similar to that faced by early novelists.

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Lit Options for Election Day Defeat

Responding to election day loss, will we be calm like Henry Fielding or in agony like Grendel?

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Novels and Baseball Fans, Fixated on Time

As I watched the amazing day of baseball last Wednesday, I found myself thinking (being the literature nerd that I am) that the English novel was invented to do justice to reality when it got this dramatic and complex.

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One of Literature’s Sexiest Eating Scenes

Homer gains Fielding’s admiration by his ability to move seamlessly between epic grandeur and “the shameless dog of the belly.” Perhaps it is Homer’s dexterity that gives Fielding the idea for his own contribution to “Great Eating Scenes in Literature.”

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Eric Cantor and Famous Literary Sneers

If you’ve been paying any attention to America’s budget battles, you know that Congressional Republicans are currently engaged in a dangerous game of chicken with President Obama over raising the debt ceiling. Today’s post on the subject features a parallel with Macbeth and a glance at famous literary sneers.

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Satirizing Doctors, the Best Medicine

Doctors debate while patient dies in Hogarth’s “Harlot’s Progress,” plate V I’ve talked several times about my friend Alan, who has been battling cancer for a while now.  At present he is still alive, still working out at the gym, and still in the dark about what kind of cancer he has.   He longs for […]

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Neuro-Lit: English’s “Next Big Thing”?

A number of my friends have sent me the following New York Times article about the “next big thing in English”: neuro-lit.   Apparently fictionally identifying with story characters and plots is being studied from a brain point of view.  Researchers are looking at how many levels of abstraction the mind can hold (Virginia Woolf is credited […]

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