The Unthinkable Swift
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The Unthinkable Swift
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Author : Warren Montag
language : en
Publisher: Verso
Release Date : 1994-09-17
The Unthinkable Swift written by Warren Montag and has been published by Verso this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 1994-09-17 with Literary Criticism categories.
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.
The Skeptical Sublime
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Author : James Noggle
language : en
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Release Date : 2001-11-01
The Skeptical Sublime written by James Noggle and has been published by Oxford University Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2001-11-01 with Literary Criticism categories.
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.
Political Magic
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Author : Christopher F. Loar
language : en
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Release Date : 2014-06-05
Political Magic written by Christopher F. Loar and has been published by Fordham Univ Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2014-06-05 with Literary Criticism categories.
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.
The Fringes Of Belief
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Author : Sarah Ellenzweig
language : en
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Release Date : 2008-09-25
The Fringes Of Belief written by Sarah Ellenzweig and has been published by Stanford University Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2008-09-25 with Literary Criticism categories.
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.
Small World
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Author : Seamus Deane
language : en
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Release Date : 2021-05-27
Small World written by Seamus Deane and has been published by Cambridge University Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2021-05-27 with History categories.
A survey of 200 years of Irish writing, this book offers analytic accounts of key Irish works and authors.
Textual Traffic
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Author : S. Shankar
language : en
Publisher: SUNY Press
Release Date : 2001-04-19
Textual Traffic written by S. Shankar and has been published by SUNY Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2001-04-19 with Literary Criticism categories.
Examines travel narratives as a genre.
Animals And Other People
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Author : Heather Keenleyside
language : en
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Release Date : 2016-11-21
Animals And Other People written by Heather Keenleyside and has been published by University of Pennsylvania Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2016-11-21 with Literary Criticism categories.
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.
Strange Country
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Author : Seamus Deane
language : en
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Release Date : 1999
Strange Country written by Seamus Deane and has been published by Oxford University Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 1999 with History categories.
Strange Country identifies the origin, the development, and the success of the Irish literary tradition in English as one of the first literature that is both national and colonial.
Political Philosophy In Gulliver S Travels
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Author : Lloyd W. Robertson
language : en
Publisher: Springer Nature
Release Date : 2022-07-01
Political Philosophy In Gulliver S Travels written by Lloyd W. Robertson and has been published by Springer Nature this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2022-07-01 with Political Science categories.
This book analyzes Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels from a political philosophy perspective. When authors have focused on politics in Swift’s writings, this has usually meant a study of how Swift located himself on issues of his day such as church and state, and Ireland. Robertson claims by contrast that Gulliver’s Travels is fundamentally a book about the “ancients” (e.g. Plato, Aristotle), and the “moderns” (science and technology), and their contrasting views about the human condition. The claim that the Travels is “a kind of prolegomena” to political philosophy leaves open the possibility that it does not achieve, or seek to achieve, a fusion of various teachings but rather uses the device of alien societies to point us to uncomfortable aspects of political philosophy’s “larger questions” we are prone to ignore. Swift, Robertson argues, draws our attention to some version of the classical republic, as idealized in Aristotle’s political writings and in Plato’s Republic, as opposed to a modern regime which, at its best or most intellectual, emphasizes modern science and technology in combination as a way to improve the human condition.
Irish Classics
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Author : Declan Kiberd
language : en
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Release Date : 2001
Irish Classics written by Declan Kiberd and has been published by Harvard University Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2001 with Literary Criticism categories.
A celebration of the tenacious life of the enduring Irish classics, this book by one of Irish writing's most eloquent readers offers a brilliant and accessible survey of the greatest works since 1600 in Gaelic and English, which together have shaped one of the world's most original literary cultures. In the course of his discussion of the great seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Gaelic poems of dispossession, and of later work in that language that refuses to die, Declan Kiberd provides vivid and idiomatic translations that bring the Irish texts alive for the English-speaking reader. Extending from the Irish poets who confronted modernity as a cataclysm, and who responded by using traditional forms in novel and radical ways, to the great modern practitioners of such paradoxically conservative and revolutionary writing, Kiberd's work embraces three sorts of Irish classics: those of awesome beauty and internal rigor, such as works by the Gaelic bards, Yeats, Synge, Beckett, and Joyce; those that generate a myth so powerful as to obscure the individual writer and unleash an almost superhuman force, such as the Cuchulain story, the lament for Art O'Laoghaire, and even Dracula; and those whose power exerts a palpable influence on the course of human action, such as Swift's Drapier's Letters, the speeches of Edmund Burke, or the autobiography of Wolfe Tone. The book closes with a moving and daring coda on the Anglo-Irish agreement, claiming that the seeds of such a settlement were sown in the works of Irish literature. A delight to read throughout, Irish Classics is a fitting tribute to the works it reads so well and inspires us to read, and read again.