Claude Rawson

The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism

This latest volume in the celebrated Cambridge History of Literary Criticism surveys literary criticism of the Romantic period, chiefly in Europe. Its seventeen chapters are by internationally respected academics and explore a range of key topics and themes. The book is designed to help readers locate essential information and to develop approaches and viewpoints for a deeper understanding of issues discussed by Romantic critics or those that were fundamental to their works. Primary and secondary bibliographies provide a guide for further research.

Satire and sentiment, 1660-1830

1. Rochester 2. Oldham 3. Mock-heroic and war I: Swift, Pope, and others 4. Mock-heroic and war II: Byron, Shelley, and heroic discredit 5. Revolution in the moral wardrobe: mutations of an image from Dryden to Burke 6. The Tatler and Spectator 7. Richardson, alas 8. Boswells life and journals 9. Boswells Life of Johnson 10. Dining out in Paris and London: Thomas Moores journal 11. Satire, sensibility, and innovation in Jane Austen: Persuasion and the minor works.

The character of Swift's satire : a revised Focus

The nature, style, and targets of Swifts witty, biting, and sometimes violent satire are critically investigated in this collection of essays. They portray Swifts social criticism in the light of his involvement in the politics of Anglo-Irish relations, and trace his literary roots, describing his connection with the Renaissance and studying his use of cliches and rhetoric.

Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century

An assessment of recent scholarly work treating the literature of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century and some general observations on the state of the profession. A full bibliography and price list of the works received by SEL for consideration follow.

Unparodying and Forgery: The Augustan Chatterton

Thomas Chatterton (1752–70) is famous for inventing the fifteenth-century poet Thomas Rowley, writing the latter’s poems, passing them off as authentic articles, and doing all this before he died at 17. He fooled some of the people most of the time, but judges competent in the history of English language and prosody refused to be taken in, not always as quickly as one might have expected. The enterprise was a perverse variant of the ‘medievalism’ which produced Percy’s Reliques (1765), as well as part of the curious mid-century flowering of pre-Romantic ‘forgery’ whose other famous example was Macpherson‘s Ossian.

L’édition pseudo-scientifique de Swift à Mailer

Cet article propose une nouvelle comparaison entre Swift, Sterne, et un certain nombre de sensibilites post-romantiques et modernistes, sujet qui m’occupe depuis quelque temps, mais qui est analyse ici dans un contexte que je n’avais pas auparavant explore, celui du phenomene de l’edition pseudo-scientifique. Les ouvrages de fiction, qu’ils soient ou non satiriques, se presentent comme des œuvres pourvues de notes de bas de page et de scholia marginales, avec le signalement de pretendues lacu...

Lives And Dislikes: Johnson's Lives of the Poets

This final paragraph of the Life of Gray, as Roger lonsdale points out with repeated emphasis in his vivid and learned edition of the Lives of the Poets, was intended by Johnson to be the closing words “not merely [of] ‘Gray’ itself, but his entire survey of english poetry.” This intention was the more remarkable because, as lonsdale describes it, “the real ending in terms of composition is the defiant last paragraph” of the Life of Pope:

James Boswell's 'Life of Johnson': An Edition of the Original Manuscript, in Four Volumes. Vol. 1. 1709-1765

Marshall Waingrows opus magnum is not a corrected edition of the printed text of Boswells Life of Johnson. Rather, Waingrow presents an edition of the manuscript which enables us to follow Boswells compositional process through successive revisions.