Jonathan Wild (Oxford World's Classics) - Softcover

Fielding, Henry

3.39

573 ratings by Goodreads

9780192804082: Jonathan Wild (Oxford World's Classics)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0192804081 ISBN 13: 9780192804082

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2004

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

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, and satirists 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 fixed literary 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.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

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).

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.