Contemporary Studies Of Swift S Poetry

Individually the seventeen essays in this volume reflect the particularity of Swift's verse, while together they suggest the patterns of his thought and attest to his artistic achievement. Written by some of the most noted scholars of Swift, these essays are responses to specific challenges in the poet's work, and represent our current understanding of Swift's canon and its relation to the forms of Augustan poetry.

The author shows how Swift's poetry reveals a structural unity when it is examined as a coherent whole. The structure that emerges is a dynamic relationship between the effort to order--the poem's principle of unity--and an opposing principle of expansion.

This book explicates Jonathan Swift's poetry, reaffirming its prominence in competing literary traditions.

Jonathan Swift and Philosophy is the first book to analyse and interpret Swift’s writing from a philosophical angle. By placing key texts of Swift in their philosophical and cultural contexts and providing background to their history of ideas, it demonstrates how well informed Swift’s criticism of the politics, philosophy, and science of his age actually was. Moreover, it also sets straight preconceptions about Swift as ignorant about the scientific developments of his time. The authors offer insights into, and interpretations of, Swift’s political philosophy, ethics, and his philosophy of science and demonstrate how versatile a writer and thinker Swift actually was. This book will be of interest to scholars of philosophy, history of ideas, and 18th century literature and culture.

Provides a comprehensive alphabetical reference to the life and work of Jonathan Swift.

An important study of how Swift's texts were circulated, and the different meanings of print and manuscript in his career.

Ann Kelly's provocative book breaks the mold of Swift studies. Twentieth century Swift scholars have tended to assess Jonathan Swift as a pillar of the eighteenth-century 'republic of letter', a conservative, even reactionary voice upholding classical values against the welling tide of popularization in literature. Kelly looks at Swift instead as a practical exponent of the popular and impressario of the literary image. She argues that Swift turned his back on the elite to write for a popular audience, and that he annexed scandals to his fictionalized print alter ego, creating a continual demand for works by or about this self-mythologized figure. A fascinating look at print culture, the commodification of the author, and the history of popular culture, this book should provoke lots of discussion.

A literary-historical account of English poetry from Anglo-Saxon writings to the present.