Contemporary Studies of Swift's Poetry

Contemporary Studies of Swift's Poetry
Author: John Irwin Fischer
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
Total Pages: 228
Release: 1981
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780874131734

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.

Reading Swift's Poetry

Reading Swift's Poetry
Author: Daniel Cook
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2020-08-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108899102

Poets are makers, etymologically speaking. In practice, they are also thieves. Over a long career, from the early 1690s to the late 1730s, Jonathan Swift thrived on a creative tension between original poetry-making and the filching of familiar material from the poetic archive. The most extensive study of Swift's verse to appear in more than thirty years, Reading Swift's Poetry offers detailed readings of dozens of major poems, as well as neglected and recently recovered pieces. This book reaffirms Swift's prominence in competing literary traditions as diverse as the pastoral and the political, the metaphysical and the satirical, and demonstrates the persistence of unlikely literary tropes across his multifaceted career. Daniel Cook also considers the audacious ways in which Swift engages with Juvenal's satires, Horace's epistles, Milton's epics, Cowley's odes, and an astonishing array of other canonical and forgotten writers.

The Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets

The Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets
Author: Gerald Dawe
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 473
Release: 2018
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108420354

A fresh, accessible and authoritative study that conveys the richness and diversity of Irish poets, their lives and times.

Jonathan Swift and Philosophy

Jonathan Swift and Philosophy
Author: Janelle Pötzsch
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2016-12-07
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1498521541

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.

English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, 1700-1789

English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, 1700-1789
Author: David Fairer
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 390
Release: 2014-10-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317892879

In recent years the canon of eighteenth-century poetry has greatly expanded to include women poets, labouring-class and provincial poets, and many previously unheard voices. Fairer’s book takes up the challenge this ought to pose to our traditional understanding of the subject. This book seeks to question some of the structures, categories, and labels that have given the age its reassuring shape in literary history. In doing so Fairer offers a fresh and detailed look at a wide range of material.

Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift
Author: Nigel Wood
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2014-06-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317893158

This collection of critical thinking situates the satire of Jonathan Swift within both its eighteenth-century contexts and our modern anxieties about personal identity and communication. Augustan satire at its most provocative is not simply concerned with the public matters of politics or religion, but also offers a precise medium in which to express the paradox of ironic detachment amidst deep conviction. The critics chosen for this volume demonstrate the complexity of Swift's work. Its four sections explore matters of authorial identity, the relation between Swift's writing and its historical context, the full range of his comments on gender, and his deployment of metaphor and irony to engage the reader. Swift has often been regarded as a writer who anticipated many twentieth-century cultural preoccupations, and this volume provides an opportunity to test just how modern he actually was. It also provides an answer to those who would wish to simplify his writing as that of Tory and misogynist. The theoretical perspectives of the contributors are lucidly explained and their critical terms located in the wider contexts of contemporary theory in the introduction and headnotes. The volume places Swift historically within the philosophical and religious traditions of eighteenth-century thought.

The Donna Angelica and the British Enlightenment Poets

The Donna Angelica and the British Enlightenment Poets
Author: A.D. Cousins
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2024-08-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1040104649

The aim of the book is to propose new interpretations of poets who are among the most valued and discussed in the British Enlightenment. In fulfilling its aim, the book covers English poetry—and intellectual history—from the Restoration to the later eighteenth century. It examines how the myth of the donna angelica (the angelic lady), ancient in origin but given its best-known form within the medieval literature of fin’amor, lives on beyond the Middle Ages and the Renaissance into the Enlightenment. To be more precise, it studies how some major Augustan poets appropriate and recreate what, for convenience, can be called the donna angelica topos (or, the angelic lady motif). They do so for a great many reasons linked with quite diverse circumstances. Nevertheless, the myth’s intellectual richness, emotional intensity, and inherent ambiguities mean that it offers each of them a powerful way for articulating, interpreting, exploring refractions of eros—whether singly or diversely directed, concerned with sexuality or spirituality, informing personal or public experience. The myth has as many faces, so to speak, as does desire; it is one and yet many. Thus, the book pursues a particular fable of eros that appears in a multiplicity of texts in a multiplicity of guises. It studies how some of the most interesting poets from Dryden to Crabbe bring the angelic lady motif into modernity.

Jonathan Swift and the Vested Word

Jonathan Swift and the Vested Word
Author: Deborah Baker Wyrick
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 278
Release: 1988
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780807817803

In Jonathan Swift and the Vested Word, Deborah Wyrick argues that modern Continental and American literary theory is "tantalizingly applicable to Swiftian texts." Its applicability, she writes, "stems from Swift's interest in and exploration of what are now though of as phenomenological, structuralist, poststructuralist, and new historicist concerns: how a life in language comes into being, how semiotic systems determine meaning, how texts open up their own systems to other texts and to multiple interpretations." Wyrick investigates Swift's confrontations with three theories of language current in his day, theories that locate meaning in the thing named, in the idea behind the word, or in the response of the audience. She concludes that Swift fashioned a fourth theory of meaning, one that locates meaning in and among words themselves. Because of his fear of the anarchic potential of language, Swift attempted to invest his words with extratextual authority; yet a powerful counterforce was his desire to exploit the possibilities of language divested of stable significance. These divestitures, particularly the word-play and language games, ultimately served serious personal and social purposes. A crucial personal purpose was Swift's ability to create a textual self, which he did, Wyrick maintains, by constructing defensive transvestitures centered on clothes and money. These parallel sign systems produced Swift's greatest achievement in using the resources of language and history to effect political action. By using the entire Swift canon -- poems and prose narratives, letters and essays, sermons and satires -- Wyrick presents Swift's struggle with the inadequacies of language and its inability to answer the tremendous demands he made upon it. Originally published 1988. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry

A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry
Author: Christine Gerrard
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 624
Release: 2014-02-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1118702298

A COMPANION TO & EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETRY A COMPANION TO & EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETRY Edited by Christine Gerrard This wide-ranging Companion reflects the dramatic transformation that has taken place in the study of eighteenth-century poetry over the past two decades. New essays by leading scholars in the field address an expanded poetic canon that now incorporates verse by many women poets and other formerly marginalized poetic voices. The volume engages with topical critical debates such as the production and consumption of literary texts, the constructions of femininity, sentiment and sensibility, enthusiasm, politics and aesthetics, and the growth of imperialism. The Companion opens with a section on contexts, considering eighteenth-century poetry’s relationships with such topics as party politics, religion, science, the visual arts, and the literary marketplace. A series of close readings of specific poems follows, ranging from familiar texts such as Pope’s The Rape of the Lock to slightly less well-known works such as Swift’s “Stella” poems and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Town Eclogues. Essays on forms and genres, and a series of more provocative contributions on significant themes and debates, complete the volume. The Companion gives readers a thorough grounding in both the background and the substance of eighteenth-century poetry, and is designed to be used alongside David Fairer and Christine Gerrard’s Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (3rd edition, 2014).

Eighteenth-century Contexts

Eighteenth-century Contexts
Author: Howard D. Weinbrot
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2001
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780299174804

This text offers an array of essays that consider literary, intellectual, political, theological and cultural aspects of the years 1650-1800, in the British Isles and Europe. At the centre of the book is Jonathan Swift; other essays discuss Alexander Pope, 18th-century music and poetry, William Congreve, James Boswell, Samuel Richardson, and women's novels of the 18th century.