Genre, Vol. 50, No. 2 July 2017 DOI 10.1215/00166928-3890064 © 2017 by University of Oklahoma David Simple and the Ethics of Genre bill knight Like Samuel Johnson’s later Rasselas (1759) and Voltaire’s Candide (1759), the frst of Sarah Fielding’s David Simple novels begins with an originating event of exile that generates narrative. The ensuing plot of wandering spawns the emer - gent threats to the characters’ commitment to their mutual ethical project of friendship. Unlike those two later works, Fielding’s David Simple sequence of novels (David Simple [1744], Familiar Letters [1747], and Volume the Last [1753]) traverses an English milieu, from London to Lincolnshire to Heddington to Bath. Across the landscape generated by the sequence, David and the companions he collects throw themselves into quixotic attempts to locate friendship amid the vivid tableau of English life. But this quixotism is not unalloyed: it is mixed with the elements and exilic values of the picaresque, a close but often agonistic generic cousin of quixotism. Exilic wandering emerges in David Simple as the occasion for a critique of the generic and narrative representation of ethical being; the picaresque and the quixotic are the generic modes that enable this generic- ethical testing to emerge as the problem to be engaged by the novels’ plot. The picaresque and the quixotic introduce a drama of genres that stretches itself along the continuing narrative line that invites us to read Volume the Last as the sequel of the frst novel. Tracing the drama of genres inaugurated by the frst novel’s opening generic engagements into their denouement in Volume the Last, we can confront the span and the dialectical motion of Sarah Fielding’s winnowing of the ethical potential of genres. 1 1. Allen Michie (2007, 108) has made a compelling case for Fielding’s Familiar Letters between the Principal Characters in David Simple (1747) as not merely the proper “sequel” to David Simple but a work that should be categorized as a novel (rather than “a miscellany of moral anecdotes,” as Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/genre/article-pdf/50/2/267/499622/GEN502_06Knight_FF.pdf by PORTLAND STATE UNIV user on 12 September 2021