Letter
Bibliography
21 September 1995
Linda Colley (LRB, 21 September) says Boswell’s London Journal ‘is no longer in print’. It is in fact available as a paperback from the Edinburgh and Yale University Presses, and selling steadily.
Claude Rawson
Claude Rawson is a professor of English at the University of Warwick. His books include Henry Fielding and the Augustan Ideal under Stress and Gulliver and the Gentle Reader. He is editor of the Modern Language Review.
Letter
Authorial Displeasure
23 February 1995
I am warmly grateful for W.B. Carnochan’s handsome remarks on my book Satire and Sentiment 1660-1830 (LRB, 23 February). In the course of them, however, he ascribes to me a ‘Tory interpretation of history as decline and fall’ and a sense of being in ‘the dark and latter days of empire’. Since I’ve never knowingly proposed a Tory interpretation of anything, and thought I’d kept my nostalgia...
Letter
Groovy
9 April 1992
Mr Matthew Leigh (Letters, 14 May) attributes to me a collection of opinions I don’t recognise myself as holding. I don’t believe in ‘rules’, or share the views he ascribes to Aristotle and Schiller. I don’t object to authorial intrusions, even in modern imitations of non-intruding authors. I disliked Logue’s sleeve pulling, which I described as sticky with self-regard, as distinct from...
Letter
Old Literature and its Enemies
25 April 1991
Mr Banerjee (Letters, 11 July) has a point. I said British universities were only relatively resistant. Polytechnics have been the main proponents in Britain of the anti-literary phenomena I described, and I think it possible that the abolition of the binary divide, in most ways desirable and long overdue, may turn out to be bad for English studies, which are characteristically immune to sensible developments...
Letter
An Epiphany of Footnotes
16 March 1989
Marjorie Perloff’s eloquent discourse on Modernist self-quotation (Letters, 4 May) is at such a tangent from my argument that I have no difficulty in agreeing with much of it, in the way I would agree that Milton wrote Paradise Lost or that Europe was at war in 1914-1918: unless, that is, she really wants to persuade us that the works of Joyce and Proust (‘to name two’, in addition to naming...
Pieces about Claude Rawson in the LRB
A Spot of Firm Government: Claude Rawson
Terry Eagleton, 23 August 2001
It is remarkable how many literary studies of so-called barbarians have appeared over the past couple of decades. Representations of Gypsies, cannibals, Aboriginals, wolfboys, noble savages:...
Uppish
W.B. Carnochan, 23 February 1995
Item: in 1684, there appeared John Oldham’s posthumous Remains in Verse and Prose, with a prefatory elegy by John Dryden, ‘Farewell, too little and too lately known’....
Denis Donoghue writes about the Age of Rawson, and Rogers
Denis Donoghue, 6 February 1986
Now that the main ideas at large in the 18th century have been elaborately described, students of the period have been resorting to more oblique procedures. In 1968, in The Counterfeiters, Hugh...
Masters
Christopher Ricks, 3 May 1984
The life of Swift by Irvin Ehrenpreis is a great act of consonance. But one reviewer has deprecated the fact that Ehrenpreis does not write with Swift’s genius. So the first thing to say is...
Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.
Sign up to our newsletter
For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.