Swift and Others
Swift and Others
Jonathan Swift's influence on the writings and politics of England and Ireland was reinforced by a combination of contradictory forces: an authoritarian attachment to tradition and rule, and a vivid responsiveness to the disorders of a modernity he resisted and yet helped to create. He was, perhaps even more than Pope, a dominant voice of his times. The rich variety of the literary culture to which he belonged shows the penetration of his ideas, personality and style. This is true of writers who were his friends and admirers (Pope), of adversaries (Mandeville, Johnson), of several who became great ironists in his shadow (Gibbon, Austen), and of some surprising examples of Swiftian afterlife (Chatterton). Claude Rawson, leading scholar of the works of Swift, brings together recent essays, as well as classic earlier work extensively revised, to offer fresh insights into an era when Swift's voice was a pervasive presence.
- Explores the impact of Swift and the penetration of his ideas, personality and style on other great satirists of the English Augustan tradition
- By Claude Rawson, a prominent literary critic and foremost scholar of the works of Jonathan Swift
- Offers revised and enlarged versions of Claude Rawson's important essays on satire not otherwise readily available, together with uncollected and unpublished work
Reviews & endorsements
"Rawson is a leading critic of eighteenth-century literature. He combines profound learning with tremendous range and stylistic grace, and he approaches everything he writes about with great originality."
J. T. Lynch, Choice
Product details
March 2015Paperback
9781107610125
320 pages
228 × 153 × 17 mm
0.45kg
1 b/w illus.
Available
Table 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.
