Ronald Paulson (*May 27, 1930, Bottineau, North Dakota), American professor of English, specialist in English 18th-century art and culture, and the leading modern expert on William Hogarth.

  • BA Yale University, 1952
  • Ph.D. Yale University, 1958
  • University of Illinois, Instructor 1958-59, Assistant Professor, 1959-62, Associate Professor, 1962-63
  • Professor, Rice University, 1963-67
  • Professor, The Johns Hopkins University, 1967-75 (Chairman, English Department, 1968-75; Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, 1973-75)
  • Professor, Yale University, 1975-84 (Thomas E. Donnelley Professor, 1980-84; Director of Graduate Studies, English Department 1976-83; Director, British Studies Program, 1976-84)
  • Member of Academic and Advisory Committees and Governing Board of the Yale Center for British Art and the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art in London, 1975-84
  • Professor, The Johns Hopkins University, 1984- (Chairman, English Department, 1985-91; Mayer Professor of the Humanities, 1985-)
  • Member, editorial board, ELH, (1967-)
  • Senior Ed., ELH (1985-); Studies in English Literature (1963-); PMLA (1973-76); Eighteenth-Century Studies (1966-74); Johns Hopkins University Press (1973-75; 1985-89)

Books

  • Theme and Structure in Swift's 'Tale of a Tub (1960)
  • Hogarth's Graphic Works (1965)
  • The Fictions of Satire (1967)
  • Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (1967)
  • Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times (1971)
  • Rowlandson: A New Interpretation (1972)
  • Emblem and Expression: Meaning in English Art of the Eighteenth Century (1975)
  • The Art of Hogarth (1975)
  • Popular and Polite Art in the Age of Hogarth and Fielding (1979)
  • Literary Landscape: Turner and Constable (1982)
  • Representations of Revolution (1789-1820) (1983)
  • Book and Painting: Shakespeare, Milton, and the Bible (1983)
  • Breaking and Remaking: Aesthetic Practice in England, 1700-1820 (1989)
  • Hogarth's Graphic Works (rewritten and reset) (1989)
  • Figure & Abstraction in Contemporary Painting (1990)
  • Hogarth, Vols. 1-3 (1991-93)
  • The Beautiful, Novel, and Strange: Aesthetics and Heterodoxy (1997)
  • Ed., Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty (1997)
  • Don Quixote in England: The Aesthetics of Laughter (1998)
  • The Life of Henry Fielding (2000)