SOURCE: "The Institutionalization of Conflict (II): Fielding and the Instrumentality of Belief," in his The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987, pp. 382-409.

In the following excerpt, McKeon examines the representation of truth and the foundation of knowledge in Fielding's fiction, especially Jonathan Wild and Joseph Andrews. McKeon's book is an early and important major revision of Ian Watt's history of the eighteenth-century novel, The Rise of the Novel; in this chapter and throughout the book, McKeon emphasizes both cultural and philosophical movements as essential context for analyzing the development of this generic form.

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In the Richardson-Fielding rivalry of the 1740s it is easy to be reminded of the more tacit opposition between Defoe and Swift several decades earlier. The similarities are temperamental as well as cultural. Richardson's transparent vanity, masking a persistent sensitivity to his lack of "the very great Advantage of an...