Book Description
The collected letters of Jonathan Swift D.D., Irish dean and celebrated author of 'Gulliver's Travels', have long been esteemed with the best to have emerged from eighteenth century England, an age distinguished for the excellence of its letters. In the half century from 1690 to 1740 some two hundred and thirty contemporaries, in all walks of life, thought to preserve his autographs: among them were his literary friends, his printers and publishers, politicians of the day in England and Ireland, his ecclesiastical superiors and other clergy, his friends of the nobility, and closer friends and relatives. He also diligently kept many of their replies. Together these project a marvellously animated panorama not only of his own life, but of his varied acquaintance, and the scenes of London, Dublin, and rural Ireland through a deeply interesting historical era. This entirely new edition prepared by a recognized authority presents over 1500 letters, derived from the earliest authentic texts in manuscript or print, and provides the most comprehensive commentary to date, based upon published and unpublished research of the last thirty years. ... Read more

Book Description

In this critically acclaimed compendium of 11 outrageous commentaries and tales by the English language's greatest satirist, Jonathan Swift reflects on the absurdity of organized religion, classical versus modern literature, astrological predictions, eating children, andother tantalizing topics.

Customer Reviews (1)

The Greatest Satire Ever Written in English
This collection of Swift's essays gives a terrific overview of his hilarious and too true writings that have withstood the test of time. From the opening lines of the first essay (Swift's Preface to 'The Battle of the Books'): "Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own..." to the end of the book (Swift's gravestone epitaph, translated by Yeats), every selection is thought-provoking, funny, and accessible. Highly recommended! ... Read more

Book Description
Ann Kelly's provocative book breaks the mold of Swift studies. 20th-century scholars have tended to assess Jonathan Swift as a pillar of the 18th-century "republic of letters," a conservative, even reactionary voice upholding classical values against the welling tide of popularization in literature. Kelly's Swift is instead a practical exponent of the popular and impresario 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 popular print media, the commodification of the author, culture formation, and modern myth making, this book opens new ground in our understanding of one of the greatest English writers. ... Read more

Book Description

Book Description
An appraisal of Swift by his later biographers, critics, and editors. 1781-1882.

THIS TITLE IS CITED AND RECOMMENDED BY:Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. ... Read more

Book Description
Jonathan Swift was the subject of gossip and criticism in his own time concerning his relations with women and his representations of them in his writings. For over twenty years he regarded Esther Johnson, "Stella," as "his most valuable friend," yet he is reputed never to have seen her alone.From his time to our own there has been speculation that the two were secretly married--since their relationship seemed so inexplicable then and now. For thirteen of the years that Swift seemed committed to Stella as the acknowledged woman in his life, he maintained a clandestine--but apparently also nonsexual--relationship with another woman, Esther Van Homrigh, or "Vanessa." Jonathan Swift in the Company of Women looks again at these much-examined relationships and at others that reveal Swift as a man who enjoyed the company of a number of women as pupils and as ministrants to his various needs. Swift, a man with a complex private life, was also a writer whose satiric portraits of women could be unsparing. While Swift often criticized women for frivolous pastimes and idle chatter, his most notorious texts on women image their bodies as loathsome: as he once wrote in a serious political tract, a woman is a "nauseous, unwholesome carcass." Such representations cross a line by showing a repugnance for women as a sex, the biological other. They have led, not surprisingly, to repeated charges of misogyny, an issue that Jonathan Swift in the Company of Women addresses at some length. This first book-length treatment of Swift and women comprehensively examines Swift's attitude toward women in all their manifestations in his work and life: as intimates, acquaintances, proteges, wives, mothers, nurses, disobedient daughters, young women who marry older men, and--finally--as poets and critics. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Deifying Swift
Swift is a biographical conundrum and there are many unsolved questions about his life and works. Louise Barnet, in this fluent and engaging book, writes about Swift's involvement with women. In his written works Swift is a misogynist and rails against women, marriage and children;yet in his life, as Louise Barnet shows, he is constantly engaged with the ladies. Louise Barnett suggests that he was asexual and a virgin despite growing evidence to the contrary. To reach this position she ignores evidence that he had children by both Stella and Vanessa, the two mysterious women with whom he shared his life, and a documented allegation of a rape. Do we notJonathan Swift in the Company of Women owe the past our best efforts to identify and describe the 'truth'? ... Read more

Book Description
Modern scholarship has represented Jonathan Swift as both an Old Whig and a non-Jacobite Tory. Ian Higgins' contextual reassessment of Swift's political writing and recorded opinion considers the interpretative problems they present. It explores the consonance of Swift's political writing with militant Jacobite Tory writing on affairs of Church and State, and demonstrates Swift's dissimilarity from the Old Whig writers with whom modern criticism has misleadingly identified him. Swift's writings of the 1690s, during the last four years of Queen Anne's reign, and after the Hanoverian succession are shown to contain Jacobitical political implications when examined in their context in the 'paper wars' of the period. Higgins concentrates on the partisan meanings of the great satires A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's Travels, and represents Swift (as he was read by his contemporaries) as a disaffected High Church Anglican extremist with Jacobite inclinations. ... Read more

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