Publisher's Synopsis
The author Claude Rawson, Professor of English at Yale University and a distinguished eighteenth-century scholar, has been hailed as "perhaps the most excitng commentator on Augustan literature" (Patricia Bruckmann, University of Toronto Quarterly) and as "one of the most subtle and intelligent commentators on Augustan literature currently writing" (H.T. Dickinson, Times Educational Supplement).;"Gulliver and Gentle Reader" was first published in 1973 by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd. and has long been out of print, and yet, like Professor Rawson's other seminal studies, it remains highly influential and is frequently cited in recent works on the Augustan tradition. It is therefore now being reissued in paperback in order to make it readily available to students of eighteenth-century literature.;In this highly significant and exciting study, Claude Rawson is concerned primarily with what he describes as the "unofficial" energies that work below the surface of Swift's conscious themes and sometimes against them. His illuminating study of historical, cultural and psychological relationships investigates the connections between these energies and certain extremist or violent writers of later periods, including Andre Breton, Norman Mailer and Yeats, as well as the underlying similarities between Swift and other eighteenth-century writers like Pope, Johnson and Sterne.
