caa a22 4500 378858777 CHVBK 20180305123341.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161128e20031023xx s 000 0 eng 10.1515/ANGL.2003.4 doi (NATIONALLICENCE)gruyter-10.1515/ANGL.2003.4 Stierstorfer Klaus Düsseldorf Göttlicher Plot in menschlicher Story? Die Zufallsproblematik im Romanwerk Henry Fieldings [Elektronische Daten] [Klaus Stierstorfer] Fielding's novels have repeatedly been read as narrative representations of a moral, divinely ordained order. More particularly, Fielding's treatment of chance, a hotly contested field in eighteenth-century British culture, has lent itself to interpretations built on such premises. To critics like George Sherbourne or Martin Battestin, the instances of chance in Fielding's work have appeared as the novelist's application, to essentially didactic ends, of the doctrines on providence, fate and fortune propounded by the leading Anglican preachers of that time. These views on Fielding's art show themselves well-suited to some of his non-fictional writings as well as for his last and least successful novel, Amelia. A close analysis of the instances where chance and cognate concepts occur in his first three novels, however, proves these to be such heterogeneous, contradictory and indeed playful variations on this theme that it is impossible to subsume them under any underlying concepts of order or moralizing dogma. By implication, this evidence of unredeemable heterogeneity also undercuts more recent, sophisticated work on Fielding wherever the argument hinges on a systematic reading of chance in his first three novels. While structural and formal aspects typical of prevalent Anglican views on chance of the period are clearly discernible, their rhetorical application in Fielding's first three novels is eventually geared to different objectives. The most important of these are identified as comic effect in the sense of Hutcheson's theory of laughter and as the didactic experience of rhetorical instrumentalization of chance by persons of all persuasions and ideological backgrounds. © Max Niemeyer Verlag GmbH, Tübingen 2003 Anglia - Zeitschrift für englische Philologie Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG 121/1(2003-10-23), 4-31 0340-5222 121:1<4 2003 121 ANGL https://doi.org/10.1515/ANGL.2003.4 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1515/ANGL.2003.4 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Stierstorfer Klaus Düsseldorf NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Anglia - Zeitschrift für englische Philologie Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG 121/1(2003-10-23), 4-31 0340-5222 121:1<4 2003 121 ANGL CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-gruyter