Swift and Others

Claude Rawson is Maynard Mack Professor Emeritus of English at Yale University. He is a General Editor for The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift, and author of God, Gulliver and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination, 1492-1945 (2001) and Swift's Angers (Cambridge University Press, 2014). He is most recently the editor of Essential Writings of Jonathan Swift: A Norton Critical Edition (co-edited with Ian Higgins, 2010); Great Shakespeareans, Volume 1: Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Malone (2010); Literature and Politics in the Age of Swift: English and Irish Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and The Cambridge Companion to English Poets (Cambridge University Press, 2011).

• 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.

'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