Volume 9, No. 1

Marjorie Perloff, Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities Emerita at Stanford University and the Florence R. Scott Professor of English Emerita at the University of Southern California, author of many influential works of literary criticism, a highly-regarded translation of the private notebooks of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and a moving memoir, The Vienna Paradox, died in March 2024. She had intended to contribute a substantive essay to this volume, but became too ill to do so. In the weeks before her death she wrote this short memoir recalling memorable events in her fifty-year friendship with Claude Rawson

Professor Claude Rawson is a world-renowned literary critic and theorist whose profound research has shaped the field of 18th-century British literature, particularly through his influential studies of Jonathan Swift and Henry Fielding. Over the course of his distinguished career, he has held prestigious positions, including Professor of English at Yale University, Head of the English Department at the University of Warwick, and President of the International Association for Ethical Literary Criticism. His scholarly work is marked not only by its depth and rigor but also by the significant international connections he has fostered, particularly with the Chinese academic community. Through his many visits to China, where he has delivered lectures and engaged in promoting international academic exchanges, Professor Rawson has become a vital bridge between Western and Chinese literary studies. Professor Rawson’s contributions extend beyond his own scholarship; he has profoundly influenced and inspired generations of younger scholars, playing a key role in the development of international literary criticism. His insistence on returning to the primary texts in literary studies, combined with his advocacy for the integration of ethical and moral considerations in literary criticism, has reshaped the field of ethical criticism. His seminal work, God, Gulliver, and Genocide, has been translated into Chinese and has significantly impacted the study of 18th-century British literature in China. Additionally, The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, which he co-edited with H. B. Nisbet, is set to be published in Chinese, further expanding his influence in the region. Professor Rawson’s research not only provides invaluable academic resources for future scholars but also opens up new methodological approaches that continue to inspire and broaden the horizons of literary studies. As a leader in the field of Ethical Literary Criticism, he views the upholding of moral and ethical standards as a fundamental mission of literary scholars, encouraging his peers and students to actively contribute to the moral and ethical fabric of society through their work. His scholarly rigor and commitment have set a high standard for future research, and his contributions will undoubtedly be remembered as pivotal in the history of literary studies. On the occasion of Professor Claude Rawson’s 90th birthday, this special issue is dedicated to honoring the achievements of one of the great literary critics of our time. We extend our heartfelt wishes to Professor Rawson for continued good health and happiness, with our deepest gratitude for his lasting impact on the field of literary criticism.

Claude Rawson, born in Shanghai China in 1935, has taught at the University of Warwick and Yale University successively. He is one of world’s most authoritative scholars living today in the field of 18th-century literature studies. I have the privilege of meeting and knowing Rawson with the help of Nie Zhenzhao’s introduction. Working as the Deputy Secretary of the International Association for Ethical Literary Criticism, I have had more opportunities to communicate with Rawson, and have been deeply impressed by his academic spirit and personal charm. The year 2025 is to witness Rawson’s 90th birthday. Upon this occasion, I would like to pay tribute to Rawson and to recount his China complex and his contributions to the field of ethical literary criticism by drawing on my own personal experiences and communications with him.

In sustained and in-depth studies of Swift spanning more than 40 years, Claude Rawson offers a subversive interpretation of his famous political essay, A Modest Proposal. He argues that Swift has at times drawn on the protective insulation provided by irony to create a style featuring uncertainties, constantly expanding the scope of satire and leading to a tendency toward ambiguities of the essay’s ethical significance, and he also finds striking parallels between Swift’s imagination of immoral acts in disconcerting detail and Nazi’s tyrannies. Although the uncertainties are confined by an ultimate moral framework and thus certainties remain, Rawson still reminds us to attach great importance to the relationship between irony and ethics. By incorporating an ethical perspective into the interpretation of this literary classic, Rawson takes the social responsibility of a literary critic. Irony that breaks the ethical boundaries poses a great threat to human life, but irony itself has ethical value. Therefore, in order to take advantage of irony, literary criticism needs to play a full part in the process of interpreting it, which also brings a whole new level of insight to the construction of literary ethical criticism.

Claude Rawson is a world-renowned expert in eighteenth-century literature, and his research, immensely broad, judicious and erudite, is an exemplar of interdisciplinary research. However, Rawson’s interdisciplinary research is not for the sake of interdisciplinarity. It is instead a study based on a full understanding of literary texts and their historical contexts, backed with his profound knowledge of related disciplines. Rawson opposes the excesses of theory-driven abstraction in literary criticism and endorses the centrality of the particular literary text in criticism. In his elaborate analysis of the textual nuances and historical materials, he unveils in many ways the complexities and paradoxes of moral sentiments that are not readily apparent. Rawson’s critical idea that “good literary criticism is ethical” is best demonstrated in his many Presidential Addresses for the opening ceremonies of various annual symposiums of IAELC as well as in his innovative analysis of the writings of barbarism and European imagination in literature. Rawson’s view of literary criticism sheds lights on rereading the writings of barbarism and cannibalism and their cultural metaphors in Chinese and foreign literature. Borrowing Rawson’s critical approaches in his God, Gulliver, and Genocide, this paper attempts a cultural re-interpretation of the writings of cannibalism in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Lu Xun’s The Diary of a Madman, Chen Zhongshi’s White Deer Plains and Mo Yan’s The Republic of Wine.

Claude Rawson’s wide-ranging studies of eighteenth-century literature began with his studies on Henry Fielding. In the 1970s, he published Henry Fielding and the Augustan Ideal Under Stress, which placed Fielding’s works in the context of the entire cultural milieu of the early eighteenth-century. Since then, this cultural perspective on literature has been woven throughout Rawson’s academic research, forming a brilliant and rigorous brocade of criticism. However, unlike other cultural criticism based on the external study of literature, Rawson’s criticism always places literary texts as its centrality. Starting with the study on Fielding’s quick-witted style and rhetoric, he categorized “satire” as one of the cultural signs of the eighteenth-century. In the 1990s, Rawson turned to the study of satirical literature, specifically Jonathan Swift and the style of English poetry. Rawson’s diverse interests explain his academic concerns on both the aesthetic qualities of literature and its cultural function of engagement in moral dialogue.

Claude Rawson, an esteemed literary scholar and a world-renowned literary critic, turns 90 this year. His journey to literary excellence has been nothing short of remarkable, spanning over six decades of prolific contributions to the field of literary studies. This article aims to celebrate Rawson’s life and work, exploring his literary study, literary achievement, and academic exchange and friendship with China, especially his contribution to the development of Chinese Ethical Literary Criticism.