Tobias Smollett: Novelist - Tapa dura

Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) was not only a novelist but also a playwright, poet, journalist, historian, travel writer, critic, translator and editor. Trained as a physician, he believed that what was externally visible signified and gave definition to what could be known about the private, interior life. His fiction is therefore distinguished by its intensely visual qualities. ""Tobias Smollett: Novelist"" reads these qualities in Smollett's novels as exercises of a visual imagination. Along with Defoe, Richardson, Fielding and Sterne, Smollett was one of the major British novelists of his generation. Like his kindred spirit William Hogarth, he was both chronicler and interpreter of what he saw. His episodically structured narratives reflect his vision of a harsh and unpredictable world, while his characters display his understanding of the individual as moral agent. This book crosses disciplines and genres as it seeks to demonstrate intersections between the graphic and verbal arts, always with a focus on how Smollett crafted his stories.

Jerry C. Beasley is a professor of English at the University of Delaware in Newark. He is the author of "Novels of the 1740s" and editor of Smollett's "The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom." From 1987 to 1997 he served as general editor of the Georgia Edition of the Works of Tobias Smollett.