Download or read book Satire and the Correspondence of Swift written by Craig Hawkins Ulman and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1973 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the first secret publication, in 1740, of part of his correspondence with Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift's letters have become a standard source for his biographers and critics. Craig Ulman argues that the letters are not entirely reliable for biographical fact and have often been taken too literally. In this readable essay, Ulman surveys the satiric material in Swift's correspondence, highlighting his wit. The author views Swift's epistolary writing as very much a literary endeavor. He examines the pose and the persona and discusses the satiric methods the letters share with Swift's other published works.
Download or read book Fair Liberty Was All His Cry written by A. Norman Jeffares and published by Springer. This book was released on 1967-06-18 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Swift s Parody written by Robert Phiddian and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995-11-09 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of parody in Swift's early prose, and in textual and cultural developments in Swift's Britain.
Download or read book Swift and Science written by G. Lynall and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-05-22 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is thought that Swift was opposed to the new science that heralded the beginning of the modern age, but this book interrogates that assumption, tracing the theological, political, and socio-cultural resonances of scientific knowledge in the early eighteenth century, and considering what they can reveal about Swift's imagination.
Download or read book Satire written by Dustin Griffin and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-03-17 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here is the ideal introduction to satire for the student and, for the experienced scholar, an occasion to reconsider the uses, problems, and pleasures of satire in light of contemporary theory. Satire is a staple of the literary classroom. Dustin Griffin moves away from the prevailing moral-didactic approach established thirty some years ago to a more open view and reintegrates the Menippean tradition with the tradition of formal verse satire. Exploring texts from Aristophanes to the moderns, with special emphasis on the eighteenth century, Griffin uses a dozen figures—Horace, Juvenal, Persius, Lucian, More, Rabelais, Donne, Dryden, Pope, Swift, Blake, and Byron—as primary examples. Because satire often operates as a mode or procedure rather than as a genre, Griffin offers not a comprehensive theory but a set of critical perspectives. Some of his topics are traditional in satire criticism: the role of satire as moralist, the nature of satiric rhetoric, the impact of satire on the political order. Others are new: the problems of satire and closure, the pleasure it affords readers and writers, and the socioeconomic status of the satirist. Griffin concludes that satire is problematic, open-ended, essayistic, and ambiguous in its relationship to history, uncertain in its political effect, resistant to formal closure, more inclined to ask questions than provide answers, and ambivalent about the pleasures it offers.
Download or read book Jonathan Swift written by Leo Damrosch and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-12 with total page 587 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Draws on discoveries made in the past three decades to paint a new portrait of the satirist, speculating on his parentage, love life, and relationships while claiming that the public image he projected was intentionally misleading.
Download or read book The Spectacle of the Growth of Knowledge and Swift s Satires on Science written by Beat Affentranger and published by Universal-Publishers. This book was released on 2000 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a revisionist study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century satires on science with an emphasis on the writings of Jonathan Swift and, to a lesser degree, Samuel Butler and other satirists. To say, as some literary commentators do, that the satirists attacked only pseudo-scientists who failed to employ the empirical method properly is to beg a crucial question: how could the satirists possibly have distinguished the genuine scientist from the crank? By a failsafe set of Baconian principles perhaps? No, the matter is more complicated. I read the satiric literature on early modern science against a totally different understanding of what science is, how it came into being, and how it developed. Satire has a decided advantage over scientific discourse. It can rely on common sense; scientific discourse often cannot. There is always a counter-intuitive element in the genuinely new. New knowledge is in some ways always at odds with received assumptions of what is possible, reasonable, or probable. Satire on science, I suggest, can be seen as a systematic exploitation of that gap of plausibility. Natural philosophers of the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century were keenly aware of their discursive disadvantage and at times even hesitated to publish their material. They feared the satirists and the wits, who they knew would find it easy to debunk their work on commonsense grounds. But commonsense and laughter are unreliable yardsticks for measuring scientific merit. Ironically, the satirists and the natural philosophers shared some of the most fundamental epistemological assumptions of early English empiricism, for instance, the stereotypical Baconian assumption that knowledge about nature would come to us unambiguously once the mind was freed from preconception and bias. It is an assumption about scientific method that is decidedly hostile towards speculative hypothesising. Indeed, the motto of the day was not bold speculation and learning from error, but avoiding error at all costs. Yet in practice, error (or what appeared to be erroneous) was of course frequent; for science is an essentially speculative enterprise. Natural philosophers of the early modern period, however, were embarrassed by their failures and tried to explain them away. The satirists, on the other hand, could prey on these mistakes and conclude that the work of the natural philosophers was purely speculative. The reason for this rigid, anti-speculative epistemological stance, I argue, was a religious one, having to do with the conception of nature as a divine book that could be read like Scripture. This conflation of the epistemological and the theological is especially obvious in Swift. In both his satirical and non-satirical writings, he is obsessed with proposing proper standards of interpretation, and with criticising those whom he thought had corrupted these standards. Dissenters and religious enthusiasts are taken to task for their misreading of Scripture, for their corrupt religious doctrine which they erroneously claim to be based on Scripture and reason. The natural philosophers are accused of some similar hermeneutic sin; only, they have committed their interpretive transgressions against the proper interpretive standard of the book of nature. Where the natural philosophers claim to have found a new, more accurate way of reading the book of nature, Swift, I argue, sees only mis-readings. Rhetorically, Swift's satires on religious dissent perpetuate the typically Tory High-Church insinuation of sectarian and heretical sexual promiscuity. In his satires on science, Swift makes the same insinuation with respect to natural philosophers, most vividly so in A Tale of a Tub and the flying island of Laputa. The study concludes with a fresh look at Swift's rational horses in part four of Gulliver's Travels.
Download or read book English Versions of Roman Satire in the Earlier Eighteenth Century written by William Kupersmith and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses Imitations of the ancient Roman verse satirists Horace, Juvenal, and Perseus published in Britain in the first half of the eighteenth century. It endeavors to put major writers such as Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson in the context of lesser writers of the period. It also devotes attention to other canonical writers such as Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding, and Christopher Smart.
Download or read book The Practice of Satire in England 1658 1770 written by Ashley Marshall and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2013-06-28 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rather, it is a collection of episodic little histories.
Download or read book Christopher Smart and Satire written by Min Wild and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-23 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christopher Smart and Satire explores the lively and idiosyncratic world of satire in the eighteenth-century periodical, focusing on the way that writers adopted personae to engage with debates taking place during the British Enlightenment. Taking Christopher Smart's audacious and hitherto underexplored Midwife, or Old Woman's Magazine (1750-1753) as her primary source, Min Wild provides a rich examination of the prizewinning Cambridge poet's adoption of the bizarre, sardonic 'Mary Midnight' as his alter-ego. Her analysis provides insights into the difficult position in which eighteenth-century writers were placed, as ideas regarding the nature and functions of authorship were gradually being transformed. At the same time, Wild also demonstrates that Smart's use of 'Mary Midnight' is part of a tradition of learned wit, having an established history and characterized by identifiable satirical and rhetorical techniques. Wild's engagement with her exuberant source materials establishes the skill and ingenuity of Smart's often undervalued, multilayered prose satire. As she explores Smart's use of a peculiarly female voice, Wild offers us a picture of an ingenious and ribald wit whose satirical overview of society explores, overturns, and anatomises questions of gender, politics, and scientific and literary endeavors.
Download or read book The Fictions of Satire written by Ronald Paulson and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2019-12-01 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1967. In this study of the English Augustan satirists, and the Roman and subsequent authors who were their models, Professor Paulson shows how rhetoric relates to imitation, persuasion to presentation, and the imitation of the satirist to the imitation of the satiric object. He illustrates the tendency of the satirist to invade his own fiction and imitate not the prime object of his satire but the satiric persona, which consequently takes on a life of its own. By analyzing the satiric fictions of the precursors of the Augustans, the author reveals the elements they bequeathed to those who rode the high crest of the satiric wave in England, before the art of satire became submerged in the deepening trough of sentimental romanticism. Paulson shows the Tories Dryden, Pope, and Swift and the Whigs Addison and Steele to be the heirs of a long line of satirists ancient and modern, from Horace, Juvenal, Lucian, Apuleius, and Petronius to Rabelais, Cervantes and the English Elizabethan and Civil War poets. Taking Swift as his main example, Paulson examines the dualism of satire in its most interesting and ambiguous modes, and as the embodiment of rhetorical devices that are as complex mimetically as they are rhetorically.
Download or read book Factions Fictions written by Daniel Eilon and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An understanding of the linguistic, political, and moral ramifications of Private Spirit (the parochialism and partiality typical of clubs, parties, and cabals) provides insights into the logic behind Swiftian polemic and satire. Swiftian satire, an essentially private joke offering exclusive satisfaction to an elite fraternity of insiders, is shown to be a creative rhetorical adaption of private spirit.
Download or read book Artists Writers and Musicians written by Michel-Andre Bossy and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2001-10-30 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disney's animated trailblazing, Dostoyevsky's philosophical neuroses, Hendrix's electric haze, Hitchcock's masterful manipulation, Frida Kahlo's scarifying portraits, Van Gogh's vigorous color, and Virginia Woolf's modern feminism: this multicultural reference tool examines 200 artists, writers, and musicians from around the world. Detailed biographical essays place them in a broad historical context, showing how their luminous achievements influenced and guided contemporary and future generations, shaped the internal and external perceptions of their craft, and met the sensibilities of their audience.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Eighteenth Century Satire written by Paddy Bullard and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-30 with total page 744 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eighteenth century Britain thought of itself as a polite, sentimental, enlightened place, but often its literature belied this self-image. This was an age of satire, and the century's novels, poems, plays, and prints resound with mockery and laughter, with cruelty and wit. The street-level invective of Grub Street pamphleteers is full of satire, and the same accents of raillery echo through the high scepticism of the period's philosophers and poets, many of whom were part-time pamphleteers themselves. The novel, a genre that emerged during the eighteenth century, was from the beginning shot through with satirical colours borrowed from popular romances and scandal sheets. This Handbook is a guide to the different kinds of satire written in English during the 'long' eighteenth century. It focuses on texts that appeared between the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 and the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. Outlier chapters extend the story back to first decade of the seventeenth century, and forward to the second decade of the nineteenth. The scope of the volume is not confined by genre, however. So prevalent was the satirical mode in writing of the age that this book serves as a broad and characteristic survey of its literature. The Oxford Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire reflects developments in historical criticism of eighteenth-century writing over the last two decades, and provides a forum in which the widening diversity of literary, intellectual, and socio-historical approaches to the period's texts can come together.
Download or read book Infinite Variety written by Wolfram Schmidgen and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2021-08-13 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unnerved by the upheavals of the seventeenth century, English writers including Thomas Hobbes, Richard Blackmore, John Locke, Jonathan Swift, and Daniel Defoe came to accept that disorder, rather than order, was the natural state of things. They were drawn to voluntarism, a theology that emphasized a willful creator and denied that nature embodied truth and beauty. Voluntarism, Wolfram Schmidgen contends, provided both theological framework and aesthetic license. In Infinite Variety, he reconstructs this voluntarist tradition of literary invention. Once one accepted that creation was willful and order arbitrary, Schmidgen argues, existing hierarchies of kind lost their normative value. Literary invention could be radicalized as a result. Acknowledging that the will drives creation, such writers as Blackmore and Locke inverted the rules of composition and let energy dominate structure, matter create form, and parts be valued over the whole. In literary, religious, and philosophical works, voluntarism authorized the move beyond the natural toward the deformed, the infinite, and the counterfactual. In reclaiming ontology as an explanatory context for literary invention, Infinite Variety offers a brilliantly learned analysis of an aesthetic framed not by the rise of secularism, but by its opposite. It is a book that articulates how religious belief shaped modern literary practices, including novelistic realism, and one that will be of interest to anyone who thinks seriously about the relationship between literature, religion, and philosophy.
Download or read book The Literature of Satire written by Charles A. Knight and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-02-12 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Literature of Satire is an accessible but sophisticated and wide-ranging study of satire from the classics to the present in plays, novels and the press as well as in verse. In it Charles Knight analyses the rhetorical problems created by satire's complex relations to its community, and examines how it exploits the genres it borrows. He argues that satire derives from an awareness of the differences between appearance, ideas and discourse. Knight provides illuminating readings of such satirists familiar and unfamiliar as Horace, Lucian, Jonson, Molière, Swift, Pope, Byron, Flaubert, Ostrovsky, Kundera, and Rushdie. This broad-ranging examination sheds light on the nature and functions of satire as a mode of writing, as well as on theoretical approaches to it. It will be of interest to scholars interested in literary theory as well as those specifically interested in satire.
Download or read book The Encyclopedia Americana written by and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 970 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
