About the Book

Originally published in 1985, Order From Confusion Sprung brings together some of Claude Rawson's more important essays and articles on eighteenth-century subjects, most of which belong to the last decade or so, but a few earlier pieces have also been included.

Swift, Pope, and Fielding are extensively treated, and there are discussions of Johnson, Boswell, Cowper, as well as some authors of the so-called Sentimental School.

The volume also contains reappraisals of the concepts underlying such terms as neo-classic and Augustan in their application to eighteenth-century literature, and comments forthrightly on prevailing trends in the academic study of the subject in the last two decades.