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''Joseph Andrews'', or ''The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams'', was the first published full-length novel of the English author and magistrate Henry Fielding, and indeed among the first novels in the English language. Published in 1742 and defined by Fielding as a "comic epic poem in prose", it is the story of a good-natured footman's adventures on the road home from London with his friend and mentor, the absent-minded parson Abraham Adams. The novel represents the coming together of the two competing aesthetics of eighteenth-century literature: the mock-heroic and neoclassical (and, by extension, aristocratic) approach of Augustans such as Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift; and the popular, domestic prose fiction of novelists such as Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson. The novel draws on a variety of inspirations. Written "in imitation of the manner of Cervantes, the author of ''Don Quixote''" (see title page on right), the work owes much of its humour to the techniques developed by Cervantes, and its subject-matter to the seemingly loose arrangement of events, digressions and lower-class characters to the genre of writing known as picaresque. In deference to the literary tastes and recurring tropes of the period, it relies on bawdy humour, an impending marriage and a mystery surrounding unknown parentage, but conversely is rich in philosophical digressions, classical erudition and social purpose. ==Background== Fielding's first venture into prose fiction came a year previously with the publication in pamphlet form of ''Shamela'', a travesty of, and direct response to, the stylistic failings and moral hypocrisy that Fielding saw in Richardson's ''Pamela''. Richardson's epistolary tale of a resolute servant girl, armed only with her "virtue", battling against her master's attempts at seduction had become an overnight literary sensation in 1741. The implicit moral message — that a girl's chastity has eventual value as a commodity —, as well as the awkwardness of the epistolary form in dealing with ongoing events, and the triviality of the detail which the form necessitates, were some of the main targets of Fielding's parody. Richardson would continue to be a target of Fielding's first novel, but the ''Pamela'' phenomenon was just one example of what he saw as a culture of literary abuses in the mid-18th century. Colley Cibber, poet laureate and mock-hero of Pope's ''Dunciad'', is identified in the first chapter of the novel as another offender against propriety, morality and literary value. The impetus for the novel, as Fielding claims in the preface, is the establishment of a genre of writing "which I do not remember to have been hitherto attempted in our language", defined as the "comic epic-poem in prose": a work of prose fiction, epic in length and variety of incident and character, in the hypothetical spirit of Homer's lost (and possibly apocryphal) comic poem ''Margites''. He dissociates his fiction from the scandal-memoir and the contemporary novel. Book III describes the work as biography. As becomes apparent from the first few chapters of the novel in which Richardson and Cibber are parodied mercilessly, the real germ of ''Joseph Andrews'' is Fielding's objection to the moral and technical limitations of the popular literature of his day. But while ''Shamela'' started and finished as a sustained subversion of a rival work, in ''Joseph Andrews'' Fielding merely uses the perceived deprivation of popular literature as a springboard to conceive more fully his own philosophy of prose fiction. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Joseph Andrews」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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