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Abstract:

The article focuses on H. Fielding’s “A Modern Glossary” that, as it seems, does not correspond to a creation of fiction. Nevertheless namely it convinces in the polysemy and multifunctionality of the playful character of the English writer’s creative art. This playful mode of his works, which literary critics more often link with the aesthetics of Rococo, is not yet attracting a serious attention of investigators. “A Modern Glossary” is Fielding’s ironic-satirical response to the pure linguistic phenomenon — an obvious need of the literary language normalization—as well as to the social-cultural problems, embodied in the language: the fragility and ambiguity of the word “norms” and “rules” of usage, established by the society. The writer’s focusing on the Word in that work provided another projection on a man and the world no less than the utterances of philosophers and all those who tended to the “authentic” lifelikeness in the art.