1st Edition

Order from Confusion Sprung Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature from Swift to Cowper

By Claude Rawson Copyright 1985
    450 Pages
    by Routledge

    454 Pages
    by Routledge

    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

    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