Swinburne's Radical Artifice; or, The Comedian as A. C.

Though Swinburne achieved an instant notoriety in his early published work, Ruskin and Henry Adams accurately forecast the cultural resistance that his writing would provoke. The reasons were both technical and ideological. Nonetheless, the emergence of many forms of "radical artifice" after 1960 brought a recovery of some essential and neglected resources of the Modernist revolution. In the context of our "late Modernism," Swinburne's brilliant and highly innovative work may begin to come into focus again.