Joseph Andrews: A Satire of Modern Times

Simon Varey s Joseph Andrews: A Satire of Modern Times emphasizes the novels satire of the bourgeois mentality and reveals the cultural context from which it emerged. Varey stresses the novelist's concerns with the encroaching materialism of English society, and his study's themes follow those of the novel itself; popular culture, fashion, class, sex, violence, religion, and money. Varey's work offers a new approach to Joseph Andrews by explicating Fielding's humor in terms of the novel's own time and by discussing the role of politics in the daily life of the eighteenth-century citizen. Moreover, Varey has provided a detailed glossary of terms that will prove useful to students of Fielding who are not versed in the political and cidtural vocabulary of the age.