The Unthinkable Swift PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download The Unthinkable Swift PDF full book. Access full book title The Unthinkable Swift by Warren Montag. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Warren Montag
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9781859840009
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 198
Get Book
Book Description
No major figure of the English Augustan period has generated stronger and more contradictory views than Jonathan Swift. Scourge of the Whig ascendancy in his own day, vilified by the Victorians, celebrated by Yeats, he has in recent years become a significant bone of contention for prominent figures on the left like E.P. Thompson and Perry Anderson. In this highly original and subtle new study, Warren Montag situates Swift in relation to the ideological and political currents of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—in particular to what Montag perspicaciously identifies as the long crisis of the British state. Swift’s perspective, he argues, was determined less by his personality or psychology than by his position as an Anglican cleric. The church, an instrument of the Tudor and Stuart absolutist state, lapsed into institutional and ideological crisis after the Stuart’s fall. In Montag’s view, Swift’s writings were a defense of this increasingly indefensible institution. Swift employed satire because only in the negative representations of this literary form could the now effectively ‘unthinkable’ doctrines of the Church be made to appear. Opening with a historical survey of the crisis of English absolutism and the Anglican Church, Montag then gives a definitive account of the specific conflicts in philosophy against which Swift’s Anglican orthodoxy was aligned. Detailed examinations of Swift’s two prose masterpieces, A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver’s Travels, follow. Historically and philosophically informed, The Unthinkable Swift contributes not only to our understanding of a seminal figure in English literary history but also to the study of historical ideologies, in particular the once dominant religious tradition at the dawn of the first modern capitalist state.
Author: Warren Montag
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9781859840009
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 198
Get Book
Book Description
No major figure of the English Augustan period has generated stronger and more contradictory views than Jonathan Swift. Scourge of the Whig ascendancy in his own day, vilified by the Victorians, celebrated by Yeats, he has in recent years become a significant bone of contention for prominent figures on the left like E.P. Thompson and Perry Anderson. In this highly original and subtle new study, Warren Montag situates Swift in relation to the ideological and political currents of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—in particular to what Montag perspicaciously identifies as the long crisis of the British state. Swift’s perspective, he argues, was determined less by his personality or psychology than by his position as an Anglican cleric. The church, an instrument of the Tudor and Stuart absolutist state, lapsed into institutional and ideological crisis after the Stuart’s fall. In Montag’s view, Swift’s writings were a defense of this increasingly indefensible institution. Swift employed satire because only in the negative representations of this literary form could the now effectively ‘unthinkable’ doctrines of the Church be made to appear. Opening with a historical survey of the crisis of English absolutism and the Anglican Church, Montag then gives a definitive account of the specific conflicts in philosophy against which Swift’s Anglican orthodoxy was aligned. Detailed examinations of Swift’s two prose masterpieces, A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver’s Travels, follow. Historically and philosophically informed, The Unthinkable Swift contributes not only to our understanding of a seminal figure in English literary history but also to the study of historical ideologies, in particular the once dominant religious tradition at the dawn of the first modern capitalist state.
Author: Harry Farrell
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312089016
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348
Get Book
Book Description
Hailed in a starred Kirkus Review as "one of the most riveting, revealing, and intensely readable true crimers to appear in a long time", Swift Justice is Harry Farrell's unforgettable story of the mob violence that paralyzed the town of San Jose in 1933. Farrell reconstructs the kidnapping and murder of Brooke Hart and the lynching of his accused murderers days later. 8 pages of photos.
Author: Warren Montag
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822399040
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 257
Get Book
Book Description
Althusser and His Contemporaries alters and expands understanding of Louis Althusser and French philosophy of the 1960s and 1970s. Thousands of pages of previously unpublished work from different periods of Althusser's career have been made available in French since his death in 1990. Based on meticulous study of the philosopher's posthumous publications, as well as his unpublished manuscripts, lecture notes, letters, and marginalia, Warren Montag provides a thoroughgoing reevaluation of Althusser's philosophical project. Montag shows that the theorist was intensely engaged with the work of his contemporaries, particularly Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and Lacan. Examining Althusser's philosophy as a series of encounters with his peers' thought, Montag contends that Althusser's major philosophical confrontations revolved around three themes: structure, subject, and beginnings and endings. Reading Althusser reading his contemporaries, Montag sheds new light on structuralism, poststructuralism, and the extraordinary moment of French thought in the 1960s and 1970s.
Author: James Noggle
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195349571
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288
Get Book
Book Description
This book argues that philosophical skepticism helps define the aesthetic experience of the sublime in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British literature, especially the poetry of Alexander Pope. Skeptical doubt appears in the period as an astonishing force in discourse that cannot be controlled--"doubt's boundless Sea," in Rochester's words--and as such is consistently seen as affiliated with the sublime, itself emerging as an important way to conceive of excessive power in rhetoric, nature, psychology, religion, and politics. This view of skepticism as a force affecting discourse beyond its practitioners' control links Noggle's discussion to other theoretical accounts of sublimity, especially psychoanalytic and ideological ones, that emphasize the sublime's activation of unconscious personal and cultural anxieties and contradictions. But because The Skeptical Sublime demonstrates the sublime's roots in the epistemological obsessions of Pope and his age, it also grounds such theories in what is historically evident in the period's writing. The skeptical sublime is a concrete, primary instance of the transformation of modernity's main epistemological liability, its loss of certainty, into an aesthetic asset--retaining, however, much of the unsettling irony of its origins in radical doubt. By examining the cultural function of such persistent instability, this book seeks to clarify the aesthetic ideology of major writers like Pope, Swift, Dryden, and Rochester, among others, who have been seen, sometimes confusingly, as both reactionary and supportive of the liberal-Whig model of taste and civil society increasingly dominant in the period. While they participate in the construction of proto-aesthetic categories like the sublime to stabilize British culture after decades of civil war and revolution, their appreciation of the skepticism maintained by these means of stabilization helps them express ambivalence about the emerging social order and distinguishes their views from the more providentially assured appeals to the sublime of their ideological opponents.
Author: Christopher F. Loar
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823256936
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 344
Get Book
Book Description
Political Magic examines early modern British fictions of exploration and colonialism, arguing that narratives of intercultural contact reimagine ideas of sovereignty and popular power. These fictions reveal aspects of political thought in this period that official discourse typically shunted aside, particularly the political status of the commoner, whose “liberty” was often proclaimed even as it was undermined both in theory and in practice. Like the Hobbesian sovereign, the colonist appears to the colonized as a giver of rules who remains unruly. At the heart of many texts are moments of savage wonder, provoked by European displays of technological prowess. In particular, the trope of the first gunshot articulates an origin of consent and political legitimacy in colonial showmanship. Yet as manifestations of force held in abeyance, these technologies also signal the ultimate reliance of sovereigns on extreme violence as the lessthan-mystical foundation of their authority. By examining works by Cavendish, Defoe, Behn, Swift, and Haywood in conjunction with contemporary political writing and travelogues, Political Magic locates a subterranean discourse of sovereignty in the century after Hobbes, finding surprising affinities between the government of “savages” and of Britons.
Author: Sarah Ellenzweig
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804769796
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Get Book
Book Description
The Fringes of Belief is the first literary study of freethinking and religious skepticism in the English Enlightenment. Ellenzweig aims to redress this scholarly lacuna, arguing that a literature of English freethinking has been overlooked because it unexpectedly supported aspects of institutional religion. Analyzing works by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Aphra Behn, Jonathan Swift, and Alexander Pope, she foregrounds a strand of the English freethinking tradition that was suspicious of revealed religion yet often strongly opposed to the open denigration of Anglican Christianity and its laws. By exposing the contradictory and volatile status of categories like belief and doubt this book participates in the larger argument in Enlightenment studies—as well as in current scholarship on the condition of modernity more generally—-that religion is not so simply left behind in the shift from the pre-modern to the modern world.
Author: Seamus Deane
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108840868
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 375
Get Book
Book Description
A survey of 200 years of Irish writing, this book offers analytic accounts of key Irish works and authors.
Author: S. Shankar
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791449929
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252
Get Book
Book Description
Examines travel narratives as a genre.
Author: Heather Keenleyside
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812248570
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 280
Get Book
Book Description
In Animals and Other People, Heather Keenleyside argues for the central role of literary modes of knowledge in apprehending animal life. Keenleyside focuses on writers who populate their poetry, novels, and children's stories with conspicuously figurative animals, experiment with conventional genres like the beast fable, and write the "lives" of mice as well as men. From such writers—including James Thomson, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Laurence Sterne, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and others—she recovers a key insight about the representation of living beings: when we think and write about animals, we are never in the territory of strictly literal description, relying solely on the evidence of our senses. Indeed, any description of animals involves personification of a sort, if we understand personification not as a rhetorical ornament but as a fundamental part of our descriptive and conceptual repertoire, essential for distinguishing living beings from things. Throughout the book, animals are characterized by a distinctive mode of agency and generality; they are at once moving and being moved, at once individual beings and generic or species figures (every cat is also "The Cat"). Animals thus become figures with which to think about key philosophical questions about the nature of human agency and of social and political community. They also come into view as potential participants in that community, as one sort of "people" among others. Demonstrating the centrality of animals to an eighteenth-century literary and philosophical tradition, Animals and Other People also argues for the importance of this tradition to current discussions of what life is and how we might live together.
Author: Dyfed Wyn Roberts
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1608991687
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 307
Get Book
Book Description
The revival of 1904-05 had a profound effect not only on Wales, but also on many other nations. This volume of academic papers from the centenary conference in 2004 explores the local and International Impact of the revival as well as previous eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Welsh revivals. Contributors include David Bebbington and Mark A. Noll.
