Abstract

This dissertation reads Tom Jones as a book of Platonic speech that Fielding foresaw would be misread for centuries by post-Aristotelian critics of kinds of writing. It argues that he shaped his History ... of a Foundling to help human nature survive the Dunciad-like dark age that was engulfing his England. Like the ancients who inspired him, Fielding scattered his 'foundling' view of human nature throughout his writings in thousands of ironic fragments to be pieced together by empathic readers of a future age. ;Tom Jones, Fielding's "great Creation of our own", is part of the synoptic whole, lived and written, of "my own Performances". Fielding wrote it to heal cancerous modern divisions, fundamentalist and empirical, Miltonic and Lockean, in human nature's ancient unity. To do so at the height of England's infatuation with Locke's cosmetic compromise, he wrote ironically. His ironies are both self-protective and intrinsic to a double view of reality: they are ontological, dialectical, and Socratic. They reflect the inferable unity of the perceived duality of history and human nature . They are informed by two Platonic debates--the quarrels between the ancients and the moderns, and between poetry and philosophy--that represent human nature's "prodigious Variety" comprehensively. These debates present the ongoing problem of the mechanization of discourse in terms of differences between speech and writing, as in Socrates' Phaedrus account of the origins of writing in ancient Egypt. And they underlie Tom Jones' critiques of Milton and Locke as well-meaning modern nullifiers of ancient virtues--Homeric courage, Platonic eros, and Christian charity--and its artfully reformative assimilation of ancient virtues and modern genius, Lockean and Miltonic, in Fielding's "Character of an Historian". ;The dissertation assesses modern genre theory in the light of Fielding's decisive critique of neoclassic kinds theory as a nullifier of writing's essential identity as a kind of speech. Studying the Fielding criticism of Crane, Watt, Booth, Hatfield, Battestin, Rawson, Hunter, Patey, and McKeon, it argues that academic criticism perpetuates the artificial, mechanistic divisions that Fielding's humane, ironic speech resolves clearly and compellingly