Swift and History
Politics and the English Past

This book explores the importance of history to Jonathan Swift through close reading of his historical, polemical and satirical writings.

Ashley Marshall (Author)

9781107499270, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 31 August 2017

292 pages
23 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.43 kg

'Ashley Marshall's Swift and History negotiates an impressive wealth of primary and secondary sources, regularly signposting its own distinct route around a Swift we haven't quite seen before … Swift and History illuminates valuably an important dimension of his work.' Alan D. Chalmers, Modern Philology

Swift has been said to have little interest in history; his attempts to write it have been disparaged and his desire to become Historiographer Royal ridiculed. Ashley Marshall argues that history mattered enormously to Swift. He read a vast amount of history and uses historical examples copiously in his own works. This study traces Swift's classical and modern historiographical inheritance; analyses his unsuccessful attempt to write a history of England; and offers radical re-reading of his History of the Four Last Years of the Queen. A systematic analysis of Swift's view of 'authority' is highly revealing. His attitudes toward power and authority, sovereigns' and subjects' rights, parliamentary representation, and succession are reflected in his lifelong engagement with and pervasive use of the past. Studying Swift and history enables a deeper understanding of his authoritarian and historiographically Tory outlook - and how it changed when Swift's party fell from power in 1714.

Introduction
1. Swift and the historians, ancient and modern
2. Swift, Temple, and the history of England
3. The uses of history in Swiftian satire and polemic
4. 'Swift's rhapsodical Tory-book': the aims and motives of The History of the Four Last Years of the Queen
5. Swift and authority
Conclusion: Swift's Tory historiography
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: British & Irish history [HBJD1], History: theory & methods [HBA], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]