Satire and Sentiment, 1660-1830 Stress Points in the English Augustan Tradition C.J. Rawson

Claude Rawson examines the evolution of satirical writing in the period 1660-1830. In a sequence of linked chapters, some new and others revised substantially from earlier articles, he focuses on English writers from Rochester to Austen, both within a contemporaneous European context and as part of a tradition deriving from classical and 16th-century Humanist predecessors (Homer, Virgil, Erasmus, Montaigne) and leading to later writers like Flaubert and Yeats. Within the period 1660-1830 satire moved from an unusually dominant position to a relatively modest one, softened by the cult of "sensibility" or "sentiment". The transition was connected with large social and cultural changes culminating in the French Revolution. Rawson's method is to concentrate on stress points, on evasions and internal contradictions, and on continuities and discontinuities with earlier and later periods and with literatures and modes of thought outside Britain.

Claude Rawson is Maynard Mack Professor of English at Yale University.

"Rawson is himself an Augustan among critics, expressing worlds of scholarship with a pungent and delightful humanism." Donald Lyons, New Criterion "A luxuriant hybrid of keen literary criticism and well-documented cultural history...This ranging synthesis of a reeling world is mind-expanding for critics and historians, specialists and generalists." Kenneth Craven, Scriblerian "Rawson's book shows that there is considerable life and interest left in relatively traditional literary history." Charles A. Knight, Eighteenth-Century Studies "Rawson marshals an army of erudite references from Statius to Maller to illuminate the major figures: Swift, Pope, Burke, Byron, and Shelley. His conversational style is wide-ranging in the best Augustan essay-mode." Laura L. Runge, Albion