"Cliff Notes - Tom Jones" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

Upton and London. The roads are often dangerous, full of
hostile soldiers and occasional bandits. The inns are, in a
sense, homes away from home that provide hospitality, warmth,
and rest--but for a price. They're loud, boisterous, sometimes
friendly, sometimes hostile places, which vary a great deal
according to the whim of the innkeeper and the condition of the
traveler's pocketbook. The most important of them is Upton Inn,
which serves much like the setting of a French farce, with one
person coming in the front door as another is leaving by the
back door.

LONDON The London of Tom Jones is, for the most part,
high-society London. You see little of the poverty, filth, and
squalor which Charles Dickens would later portray in his novels.
You see exquisite drawing rooms, theaters, and costume balls.
Heightening the theatrical theme of the novel, this is the kind
of setting found in a drawing room stage comedy.

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TOM JONES: STYLE

The style of Tom Jones is one of its greatest pleasures.
Witty and ironic, Fielding is the master of the epigram--the
brief, clever, pointed remark. Marriages, he says, provide two
kinds of pleasures, that of pleasing someone you love, and that
of tormenting someone you hate. He employs a vast range of
classical allusions. For example, he compares the porters of
high-society houses to Cerberus, the dog that guards the gates
of hell in Greek mythology. Some of this cleverness is intended
to show up the often tedious style of his rival novelist, Samuel
Richardson. Some is just his way of showing off--but with such
flair that you indulge him.

Fielding's style has some of its roots in earlier literature.
He calls Tom Jones "a comic epic poem in prose." (Epics are long
poems such as The Iliad and The Odyssey, by Homer, and John
Milton's Paradise Lost.) To achieve that comic epic effect he
often employs the mock-heroic style, which uses the grandiose
similes found in epics not to make characters seem heroic but to
make fun of them. A typical example is found in Book II,
Chapter 4:

As fair Grimalkin, who, though the youngest of the feline
family, degenerates not in ferocity, from the elder branches of
her house, and... is equal in fierceness to the noble tyger
himself... With not less fury did Mrs. Partridge fly on the
poor pedagogue.

Fielding uses his experience as a playwright for scenes of
drawing-room comedy or farce. The scenes in Book 13, Chapters