Henry Fielding's Tom Jones and the Romance Tradition

This book argues that Tom Jones is a comic Romance, a comic Epic in prose, unique and incomparable, and that it is thoroughly in the epic-romance tradition. Its affinities are with Ariosto and Cervantes, Amadis de Gaule and Sidney's Arcadia, and this means that it is not answerable to modes of criticism proper enough to another literary realm but quite inadequate for the romance.