Because any discussion of the novel as a genre is limited by space and subject, it is necessary to introduce some terms that will limit this discussion of Fielding’s theory of the novel.
Milan Kundera discusses the “novel of play” in The Art of the Novel.  The ‘novel of play,’ Kundera explains, is a novel “conceived as a grand game”.  Kundera states that the development of the European novel of play has been killed by the rise of kitschy art, by people’s increasing inability to think about ideas received through art, and by the growing numbers of people unable to laugh at themselves, or at comedy in general.
Fielding’s response to three early novelists’ view of art suggests that Fielding was combating these three growing tendencies in what he saw developing into a new genre.  For example, he fought Defoe’s notion of ‘novel as travel narrative’ in Robinson Crusoe (1719) as something that seemed to him merely kitsch, rather than true art.  “Kitsch” is “art or objets d'art characterized by worthless pretentiousness”.  Mitchell Kalpakgian studies the classical basis of Fielding’s art, and describes how Fielding criticized Defoe for affecting to display the gory monstrosities and novelties that the shipwrecked Robinson experiences on the island as ‘marvelous’ things.  As Kalpakgian demonstrates, Fielding thought that the ‘travel novel’ in Defoe’s style presented ‘novelty for novelty’s sake,’ which tends to kill the fruit of the “philosophia perennia” of Christian Europe.  Joseph Andrews places the novel in terms of great art, rather than kitsch.
Fielding thought Richardson’s Pamela; Or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) illustrated affected virtue, rather than true virtue.  Fielding’s parodic Shamela (1741), as well as his first novel, Joseph Andrews, derides Richardson’s Pamela.  Fielding objected to Pamela’s private and interior view.  Samuel Taylor Coleridge assesses the comparison with the authors, “To take up [Fielding] after reading Richardson, is like emerging from a sick room heated with stoves, into an open lawn on a breezy day in May.”  The effect of the more open style, which Fielding describes as an  “eleemosynary common feast,” (Tom Jones, Dedication, xiv), moves the reader away from internal developments, away from complete sympathy for the characters, and acknowledges the essential ‘otherness’ of art from reality.  Fielding attempts to dispel too much passion and interior association of the reader with the artistic characters in the novel, because it contributes to praising affectation of virtue rather than true virtue.  In other words, Fielding thought people were losing themselves too much in the passionate nature of Richardson’s art, and thus not thinking about the ideas they received from Richardson’s art.  Fielding goes out of his way to remind his readers continually that they were called to be critics of his own art.  Comparing the novel reader to a traveler on a stagecoach, Fielding reminds both traveler and reader to look at nature and reflect on what Fielding is saying: “I would not advise [the reader] to travel through these pages too fast; for if he does, he may probably miss the seeing some curious productions of Nature”.  Fielding downplays the ‘novel of interiority’ and promotes instead an exterior view of the art process.
