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Explores the impact of the great satirist Jonathan Swift on other writers of the English Augustan tradition.
List of contents
Introduction; Part I. The Legacy of A Tale of a Tub, 1704-2009: 1. The typographical ego-trip from 'Dryden' to Prufrock; Part II. Swift and Others: 2. Mandeville and Swift; 3. The sleep of the dunces: 4. Pope, the couplet and Johnson; 5. Intimacies of antipathy: Johnson and Swift; 6. An unclubbable life: Sir John Hawkins on Johnson (and Swift); 7. Cooling to a gypsy's lust: Johnson, Shakespeare and Cleopatra; 8. Gibbon, Swift and irony; 9. 'The amorous effect of 'brass'': showing, telling and money in Emma; Part III. Three Occasional Pieces: 10. The soft wanton god: Rochester; 11. William Congreve; 12. Unparodying and forgery: the Augustan Chatterton.
About the author
Claude Rawson is Maynard Mack Professor Emeritus of English at Yale University. He is a General Editor for The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift, and author of God, Gulliver and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination, 1492–1945 (2001) and Swift's Angers (Cambridge University Press, 2014). He is most recently the editor of Essential Writings of Jonathan Swift: A Norton Critical Edition (co-edited with Ian Higgins, 2010); Great Shakespeareans, Volume 1: Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Malone (2010); Literature and Politics in the Age of Swift: English and Irish Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and The Cambridge Companion to English Poets (Cambridge University Press, 2011).
Summary
Leading literary critic and scholar Claude Rawson discusses the impact of Jonathan Swift, and the penetration of his ideas, personality and style, on major writers of the English Augustan tradition. Swift's influence extended beyond friends and admirers to adversaries and others who became great ironists in his shadow.
