Critical Companion to Jonathan Swift PDF Download
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Author: Paul J. DeGategno
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 1438108516
Category : Authors, Irish
Languages : en
Pages : 481
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Book Description
Provides a comprehensive alphabetical reference to the life and work of Jonathan Swift.
Author: Paul J. DeGategno
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 1438108516
Category : Authors, Irish
Languages : en
Pages : 481
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Book Description
Provides a comprehensive alphabetical reference to the life and work of Jonathan Swift.
Author: G. Lynall
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137016965
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 221
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Book Description
It is thought that Swift was opposed to the new science that heralded the beginning of the modern age, but this book interrogates that assumption, tracing the theological, political, and socio-cultural resonances of scientific knowledge in the early eighteenth century, and considering what they can reveal about Swift's imagination.
Author: Beat Affentranger
Publisher: Universal-Publishers
ISBN: 1581120680
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 194
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Book Description
This is a revisionist study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century satires on science with an emphasis on the writings of Jonathan Swift and, to a lesser degree, Samuel Butler and other satirists. To say, as some literary commentators do, that the satirists attacked only pseudo-scientists who failed to employ the empirical method properly is to beg a crucial question: how could the satirists possibly have distinguished the genuine scientist from the crank? By a failsafe set of Baconian principles perhaps? No, the matter is more complicated. I read the satiric literature on early modern science against a totally different understanding of what science is, how it came into being, and how it developed. Satire has a decided advantage over scientific discourse. It can rely on common sense; scientific discourse often cannot. There is always a counter-intuitive element in the genuinely new. New knowledge is in some ways always at odds with received assumptions of what is possible, reasonable, or probable. Satire on science, I suggest, can be seen as a systematic exploitation of that gap of plausibility. Natural philosophers of the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century were keenly aware of their discursive disadvantage and at times even hesitated to publish their material. They feared the satirists and the wits, who they knew would find it easy to debunk their work on commonsense grounds. But commonsense and laughter are unreliable yardsticks for measuring scientific merit. Ironically, the satirists and the natural philosophers shared some of the most fundamental epistemological assumptions of early English empiricism, for instance, the stereotypical Baconian assumption that knowledge about nature would come to us unambiguously once the mind was freed from preconception and bias. It is an assumption about scientific method that is decidedly hostile towards speculative hypothesising. Indeed, the motto of the day was not bold speculation and learning from error, but avoiding error at all costs. Yet in practice, error (or what appeared to be erroneous) was of course frequent; for science is an essentially speculative enterprise. Natural philosophers of the early modern period, however, were embarrassed by their failures and tried to explain them away. The satirists, on the other hand, could prey on these mistakes and conclude that the work of the natural philosophers was purely speculative. The reason for this rigid, anti-speculative epistemological stance, I argue, was a religious one, having to do with the conception of nature as a divine book that could be read like Scripture. This conflation of the epistemological and the theological is especially obvious in Swift. In both his satirical and non-satirical writings, he is obsessed with proposing proper standards of interpretation, and with criticising those whom he thought had corrupted these standards. Dissenters and religious enthusiasts are taken to task for their misreading of Scripture, for their corrupt religious doctrine which they erroneously claim to be based on Scripture and reason. The natural philosophers are accused of some similar hermeneutic sin; only, they have committed their interpretive transgressions against the proper interpretive standard of the book of nature. Where the natural philosophers claim to have found a new, more accurate way of reading the book of nature, Swift, I argue, sees only mis-readings. Rhetorically, Swift's satires on religious dissent perpetuate the typically Tory High-Church insinuation of sectarian and heretical sexual promiscuity. In his satires on science, Swift makes the same insinuation with respect to natural philosophers, most vividly so in A Tale of a Tub and the flying island of Laputa. The study concludes with a fresh look at Swift's rational horses in part four of Gulliver's Travels.
Author: Robert Phiddian
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 052147437X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 237
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Book Description
An exploration of parody in Swift's early prose, and in textual and cultural developments in Swift's Britain.
Author: Brian A. Connery
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 9780874137972
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
These thirteen essays offer not only the representations of Swift to which its title refers but also a representation of Swift scholarship at the close of the twentieth century and a return to fundamental questions about the life, writing, and views of Swift, issues raised in part by literary scholarship's return to historicism but also powerfully suggestive of a return to biography.
Author: Frank T. Boyle
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804764182
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 262
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Book Description
With much of the intellectual discourse of the last several decades concerned with reconsiderations of modernity, how do we read the works of Jonathan Swift, who ridiculed the modern even as it was taking shape? The author approaches the question of modernity in Swift by way of a theory of satire from Aristotle via Swift (and Bakhtin) that eschews modern notions that satire is meant to reform and correct. Linking satire to Nemesis, the goddess of righteous vengeance, "Swift as Nemesis" develops new readings of Swift's major satires. From his first published work, Swift associates the modern with the new science and represents modernity as a pernicious strain of narcissism that devalues humanistic discourse. In his early satires, he compiles a profane history of the modern in which the new philosophy is an extension of the methodology of alchemists, the debased Roman Catholic Church, and the various Puritan sects. This history culminates in "A Tale of a Tub" with an assault on the intellectual basis of that most formidable of all modern works, Newton's "Principia." In "Gulliver's Travels," Swift attacks modern culture while aiming at individual readers. Novelistic identification with Gulliver's narcissism (beginning with masturbation and encompassing various scatological observations) implicates readers in the larger cultural critique in which Gulliver, paralleling Narcissus, rejects cultures he encounters until he embraces a cultural image that destroys him. The wider cultural implications of Swift's work are evident in the way he uses travel as a metaphor to link the inhuman consequences of European imperialism with the discoveries of the new science. Finally, Swift's works, like the mirror Nemesis uses to destroy Narcissus, are shown to return the narcissistic projections of critics. Recognizing that Narcissus and Echo have become important to the critique of modernism, the author argues that readers will find it useful now to turn to the contextualizing role of Nemesis. She emerges from Swift's critically irreducible satire with an ironic claim on modernity itself.
Author: John Stubbs
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393634159
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 840
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Book Description
A rich and riveting portrait of the man behind Gulliver’s Travels, by a “vivid, ardent, and engaging” (New York Times Book Review) author. One of Europe’s most important literary figures, Jonathan Swift was also an inspired humorist, a beloved companion, and a conscientious Anglican minister—as well as a hoaxer and a teller of tales. His anger against abuses of power would produce the most famous satires of the English language: Gulliver’s Travels as well as the Drapier Papers and the unparalleled Modest Proposal, in which he imagined the poor of Ireland farming their infants for the tables of wealthy colonists. John Stubbs’s biography captures the dirt and beauty of a world that Swift both scorned and sought to amend. It follows Swift through his many battles, for and against authority, and in his many contradictions, as a priest who sought to uphold the dogma of his church; as a man who was quite prepared to defy convention, not least in his unshakable attachment to an unmarried woman, his “Stella”; and as a writer whose vision showed that no single creed holds all the answers. Impeccably researched and beautifully told, in Jonathan Swift Stubbs has found the perfect subject for this masterfully told biography of a reluctant rebel—a voice of withering disenchantment unrivaled in English.
Author: Kenneth Gouwens
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9789004109698
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266
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Book Description
This study, drawing extensively upon manuscript sources, provides the first comprehensive account of how Rome's humanist community coped with the 1527 sack of the city, an event traditionally viewed as signaling the transition from the Renaissance to the Catholic Reformation.
Author: Kenneth Craven
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443834327
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 115
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Book Description
This book reveals the remarkable life of a Renaissance New Yorker sustained by the play Hamlet. Craven’s detective work finds for the first time Apostle Paul’s ethical principles integrated throughout the play. The insights that emerge from this discovery reverberate throughout American culture today, explaining dramatic shifts in values that have cascaded down the generations. These dynamics reflect Craven’s lineage: a fascinating mix of genial humanists, fiery ideologues, and effective, business-minded Yorkers traced back to Shakespeare’s London. Craven melds groundbreaking literary insight with reflection on his own life, a continuing search for and demonstration of executive power.
Author: Paul Langford
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0199246408
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 402
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Book Description
In the seventeenth century the English were often depicted as a nation of barbarians, fanatics, and king-killers. Two hundred years later they were more likely to be seen as the triumphant possessors of a unique political stability, vigorous industrial revolution, and a world-wide empire.These may have been British achievements; but the virtues which brought about this transformation tended to be perceived as specifically English. Ideas of what constituted Englishness changed from a stock notion of waywardness and unpredictability to one of discipline and dedication. The evolutionof the so-called national character - today once more the subject of scrutiny and debate - is traced through the impressions and analyses of foreign observers, and related to English ambitions and anxieties during a period of intense change.
