Swift's Angers

A study of the brilliant satirist and polemicist Jonathan Swift, by one of the foremost scholars of our time.

Claude Rawson (Author)

9781107034778, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 23 October 2014

316 pages, 7 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.1 cm, 0.57 kg

'[Claude Rawson is] the most consistently brilliant Swiftian of our age. He also brings enviable depth of reading and a range of reference to his analysis of Swift and … the book contains so much lasting value that it should be read by every self-respecting Sciblerian,' Andrew Carpenter, The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats

Jonathan Swift's angers were all too real, though Swift was temperamentally equivocal about their display. Even in his most brilliant satire, A Tale of a Tub, the aggressive vitality of the narrative is designed, for all the intensity of its sting, never to lose its cool. Yet Swift's angers are partly self-implicating, since his own temperament was close to the things he attacked, and behind his angers are deep self-divisions. Though he regarded himself as 'English' and despised the Irish 'natives' over whom the English ruled, Swift became the hero of an Irish independence he would not have desired. In this magisterial account, Claude Rawson, widely considered the leading Swift scholar of our time, brings together recent work, as well as classic earlier discussions extensively revised, offering fresh insights into Swift's bleak view of human nature, his brilliant wit, and the indignations and self-divisions of his writings and political activism.

Introduction: not Timons Manner
Part I. Ireland: 1. Swift, Ireland and the paradoxes of ethnicity
2. The injured lady and the drapier: a reading of Swift's Irish tracts
Part II. Fiction: 3. The mock-edition revisited: Swift to Mailer
4. Gulliver's Travels
5. Swift's 'I' narrators
Part III. Poetry: 6. Rage and raillery and Swift: the case of Cadenus and Vanessa
7. Vanessa as a reader of Gulliver's Travels
8. Swift's poetry: an overview
9. 'I The Lofty Stile Decline': vicissitudes of the 'heroick strain' in Swift's poems
10. Savage indignation revisited: Swift, Yeats, and the 'cry' of liberty.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]