Henry Fielding and the Narration of Providence: Divine Design and the Incursions of Evil

Through his "historian" narrators, Fielding presents to the reader a sense of narrative ending that explores, with great power of poetic penetration, what claims humans can and cannot make, even retrospectively, for the realization of the divine design of the world. Fielding articulates what Richard Rosengarten terms a position of "principled diffidence" regarding the classic idea of providence: the doctrine is affirmed, but moves from its classic theological position in the earlier novels, located as the midpoint of the divine activity between creation and eschatology, to the point in Fielding's final novel, Amelia, where providence and eschatology are understood to be one and the same.