| dc.description | Although differences in their politics and moral concerns led to strikingly different emphases in their fiction, both Fielding and Richardson explore the implications for the conscientious self of a loss of aristocratic authority. The first two chapters of this thesis argue that Richardson's Pamela represents a standard by which one can evaluate contemporary representations of the conscientious self in conflict with aristocratic authority. The third chapter argues that Joseph Andrews presents a critique of aristocratic authority similar to Pamela's, but that the extreme self-consciousness of the narrator and Fielding's reliance on conventions derived from romance and dramatic comedy usually pre-empt close examination of the effects of abused aristocratic authority on the conscientious self. The fourth chapter argues that in Tom Jones Fielding presents a more sharply focused, if general, account of effects on conscientious women and men of a crisis in aristocratic authority than he does in Joseph Andrews, and that his relative success can be attributed partly to a new emphasis on the psychological destructiveness of social emulation and partly to the narrator's discussion of the difficulties of reconciling prudence and good nature. The last chapter examines social emulation in The Enquiry into the Late Increase of Robbers and Amelia to present the case that in Amelia Fielding dramatizes the effects of a loss of aristocratic authority on men and women who are convincingly presented as complex, highly individualized, and partly unknowable. | en_US |
