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Originally published in 1985, Order From Confusion Sprung brings together some of Claude Rawson's more important essays and articles on eighteenth-century subjects, most belong to the last decade or so, but a few earlier pieces have also been included. Swift, Pope and Fielding are extensively treated, and there are discussions of Johnson, Boswell, Cowper, as well as some authors of the so-called Sentimental School. The volume also contains reappraisals of the concepts underlying such terms as 'neo-classic' and 'Augustan' in their application to eighteenth-century literature, and comments forthrightly on prevailing trends in the academic study of the subject in the last two decades.
List of contents
Preface Acknowledgments Texts and Editions Used Part I: Swift 1. The Characters of Swift’s Satire: Reflections on Swift, Johnson, and Human Restlessness 2. Gulliver’s Travels and Some Modern Fictions 3. A Reading of A Modest Proposal Part II: Swift, Pope and Augustan Verse Satire 4. Swifts Poems 5. Slaughtering Satire 6. Pope’s Waste Land: Reflections on Mock-Heroic 7. Pope’s ‘Opus Magnum’ and An Essay on Man 8. ‘Neo-classic’ and ‘Augustan’ Part III: Fielding 9. Dialogue and Authorial Presence in Fielding’s Novels and Plays 10. A Journal From This World to the Next 11. Empson’s Tom Jones Part IV: Others 12. Notes on ‘Delicacy’ 13. π -ious Boswell 14. William Cowper and Christopher Smart Part V: Appendix 15. More Providence than Wit: Some Recent Approaches to Eighteenth-Century Literature Index
About the author
Claude Rawson is the author of several books on Swift, Fielding and other eighteenth-century authors, and of numerous articles and reviews both in specialist journals and in the Times Literary Supplement, New York Times Book Review and London Review of Books. He is General Editor of the Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift, the Blackwell Critical Biographies and the Unwin Critical Library.
Summary
Originally published in 1985, Order From Confusion Sprung contains reappraisals of the concepts underlying such terms as 'neo-classic' and 'Augustan' in their application to eighteenth-century literature, and comments on prevailing trends in the academic study of the subject in the last two decades.
