Publisher's Synopsis
"Order from Confusion Sprung" brings together many of Claude Rawson's most important essays and articles on 18th-century subjects. Pope, Fielding, and Swift (from whom Rawson's title is taken) are extensively treated, and there are discussions of Johnson, Boswell, Cowper, and some authors of the Sentimental School.;Rawson's characteristic critical method is to see 18th-century writers not only as necessarily rooted in their own time and culture, but also as existing in an older and continuously evolving tradition. Rawson studies their continuities and interactions with writers of our own century with the constant aim of sharpening our focus on the literature of both the past and the present.
