Jonathan Wild

by Fielding, Henry; Rawson, Claude; Bree, Linda; Amory, Hugh

• ISBN13: 9780192804082
• ISBN10: 0192804081
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-04-08
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The real-life Jonathan Wild, gangland godfather and self-styled "Thieftaker General," controlled much of the London underworld until he was executed for his crimes in 1725. Even during his lifetime his achievements attracted attention; after his death balladeers sang of his exploits, andsatirists made connections between his success and the triumph of corruption in high places. Fielding built on these narratives to produce one of the greatest sustained satires in the English language. Published in 1743, at a time when the modern novel had yet to establish itself as a fixedliterary form, Jonathan Wild is at the same time a brilliant black comedy, an incisive political satire, and a profoundly serious exploration of human "greatness" and "goodness," as relevant today as it ever was.

Author Biography

Claude Rawson is the author of many books, including Henry Fielding and the Augustan Ideal under Stress (1972), and most recently God, Gulliver, and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination, 1492-1945 (OUP, 2001). Linda Bree is the author of Sarah Fielding (1996), and the editor of Sarah Fielding's The Adventures of David Simple (Penguin, 2002).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
Introduction	p. ix
Note on the Text	p. xxxiii
Select Bibliography	p. xxxv
A Chronology of Henry Fielding	p. xxxix
Map: London in the early eighteenth century	p. xlii
Jonathan Wild	p. 1
'H.D.', The Life of Jonathan Wild	p. 183
Extract from the Preface to Miscellanies	p. 219
Advertisement to the 1754 Edition	p. 225
Note on Money	p. 226
Textual Notes	p. 227
Explanatory Notes	p. 237
Glossary	p. 301
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