Claude Rawson

Claude Rawson's picture
Maynard Mack Professor Emeritus of English

M.A., B. Litt., University of Oxford; Hon  D.Litt.,  Keele University

Claude Rawson is the author of several books on Swift, Fielding and other eighteenth-century authors, and of numerous articles and reviews both in specialist journals and in the Times Literary Supplement, New York Times Book Review and London Review of Books. He is General Editor of the Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift, the Blackwell Critical Biographies and the Unwin Critical Library. From 1989 to 2001 he served as General Editor and Chairman of the Yale Boswell Editions. He was an Editor of the Modern Language Review and Yearbook of English Studies from 1974 to 1988. His two latest books are: Swift’s Angers (2014) and Swift and Others (2015), both Cambridge University Press.

Rawson is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and serves on the Educational Advisory Board of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.  He is an Honorary Professor of the University of Warwick, where he once served at chairman of the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies. He is a former President of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. He was the Clifford Lecturer for 1992 (American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies), and Bateson Lecturer for 1999 (University of Oxford). He has lectured widely in Europe, the Americas, Australasia and the Far East.

Selected Publications

– Henry Fielding and the Augustan Ideal under Stress (1972, 1991)

– Gulliver and the Gentle Reader (1972, 1991)

– Order from Confusion Sprung (1985, 1992)

– The Collected Poems of Thomas Parnell (ed., with F.P. Lock, 1989)

– Satire and Sentiment, 1660 - 1830 (1994, 2000)

– The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, IV: The Eighteenth Century (ed., with H.B. Nisbet, 1997)

– God, Gulliver, and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination 1492-1945 (2001)

– Henry Fielding, Novelist, Playwright, Journalist, Magistrate: A Double Anniversary Tribute (1707-1754), (2008)

– (with Ian Higgins) The Essential Writings of Jonathan Swift (2009)

– Literature and Politics in the Age of Swift: English and Irish Perspectives, (2010)

– Great Shakespeareans, Volume I: Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Malone (2010)

– Swift’s Angers (2014) Cambridge University Press

– Swift and Others (2015) Cambridge University Press