Claude Rawson examines the evolution of satirical writing in the period 1660-1830. In a sequence of linked chapters, some new and others revised substantially from earlier articles, he focuses on English writers from Rochester to Austen, both within a contemporaneous European context and as part of a tradition deriving from classical and sixteenth-century Humanist predecessors (Homer, Virgil, Erasmus, Montaigne) and leading to later writers like Flaubert and Yeats. Within the period 1660-1830 satire moved from an unusually dominant position to a relatively modest one, softened by the cult of 'sensibility' or 'sentiment'. The transition was connected with large social and cultural changes culminating in the French Revolution. Rawson's method is to concentrate on stress points, on evasions and internal contradictions, and on continuities and discontinuities with earlier and later periods and with literatures and modes of thought outside Britain.

Claude Rawson examines the evolution of satirical writing in the period 1660-1830. In a sequence of linked chapters, some new and others revised substantially from earlier articles, he focuses on English writers from Rochester to Austen, both within a contemporaneous European context and as part of a tradition deriving from classical and sixteenth-century Humanist predecessors (Homer, Virgil, Erasmus, Montaigne) and leading to later writers like Flaubert and Yeats. Within the period 1660-1830 satire moved from an unusually dominant position to a relatively modest one, softened by the cult of 'sensibility' or 'sentiment'. The transition was connected with large social and cultural changes culminating in the French Revolution. Rawson's method is to concentrate on stress points, on evasions and internal contradictions, and on continuities and discontinuities with earlier and later periods and with literatures and modes of thought outside Britain.

In the past twenty years our understanding of the novel's emergence in eighteenth-century Britain has drastically changed. Drawing on new research in social and political history, the twelve contributors to this Companion challenge and refine the traditional view of the novel's origins and purposes. In various ways each seeks to show that the novel is not defined primarily by its realism of representation, but by the new ideological and cultural functions it serves in the emerging modern world of print culture. Sentimental and Gothic fiction and fiction by women are discussed, alongside detailed readings of work by Defoe, Swift, Richardson, Henry Fielding, Sterne, Smollett, and Burney. This multifaceted picture of the novel in its formative decades provides a comprehensive and indispensable guide for students of the eighteenth-century British novel, and its place within the culture of its time.

Die europäische Romantik war nicht nur heterogen und intern zerstritten. Sie hatte sich auch gegen Aufklärung und Klassizismus zu verteidigen, welche um die Zeit der Französischen Revolution weiterlebten. Klassizisten betrachteten die Romantik als Anhäufung abtrünniger »neuer Schulen«, die das Monopol der Classical Tradition bedrohten. Die erbitterten Debatten in Ästhetik und Politik wurden auf beiden Seiten mit den überkommenen Strategien der klassischen »ars disputandi« geführt. Unter schwerstem satirischem Beschuss begann die Romantik, sich als eine Bewegung zu begreifen, und es entstand der problematische Gegensatz von »klassisch« und »romantisch«. Diese Konstruktion war aber unverzichtbar, um die Fronten im Wirrwarr der Stimmen zu klären, und blieb es auch in der Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft, die auf solche Subsumptionen nicht verzichten kann. Die Classical Tradition, die das Christentum einschließt, erweist sich als ein laufender Prozess von der Antike bis heute.

Provides twenty-first century readers with a new, comprehensive and suggestive account of the sentimental novel in the eighteenth century.