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.

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.

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.

Preface

Acknowledgments

Texts and Editions Used

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

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'

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

12. Notes on 'Delicacy'

13. p -ious Boswell

14. William Cowper and Christopher Smart

15. More Providence than Wit: Some Recent Approaches to Eighteenth-Century Literature

Index