Swift and Others

Explores the impact of the great satirist Jonathan Swift on other writers of the English Augustan tradition.

Claude Rawson (Author)

9781107034785, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 19 March 2015

320 pages, 1 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.1 cm, 0.57 kg

'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

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.

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.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]