Download or read book Swift s Anatomy of Misunderstanding written by Frances Deutsch Louis and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 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 Critical Companion to Jonathan Swift written by Paul J. DeGategno and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2014-05-14 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a comprehensive alphabetical reference to the life and work of Jonathan Swift.
Download or read book Jonathan Swift and the Burden of the Future written by Alan D. Chalmers and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Alan Chalmers's Jonathan Swift and the Burden of the Future explores Swift's temporal apprehension in the context of the pertinent seventeenth- and eighteenth-century religious, scientific, and cultural debates. It also compares Swift's imaginative understanding of time with that of such other writers as Juvenal, Rabelais, Milton, Pope, Gray, and Whitman."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Download or read book Annals of Gullibility written by Stephen Greenspan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2008-12-30 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book to provide a comprehensive look at the problem of gullibility, this groundbreaking work covers how and why we are fooled in areas that range from religion, politics, science, and medicine, to personal finance and relationships. First laying the groundwork by showing gullibility at play in the writings of historic authors we all know, developmental psychologist Stephen Greenspan follows with chapters that describe social duping across the gamut of human conduct. From people who pour bucks into investment scams, to those who follow the faith of scientologists, believe in fortunetellers, or champion unfounded medicine akin to snake oil, we all know someone who has been duped. A lot of us have been duped ourselves, out of naive trust. It's not a matter of low intelligence that moves us to, without evidence, believe the words of politicians, salesmen, academics, lawyers, military figures, or cult leaders, among others. Greenspan shows us the four broad reasons we become drawn into gullible behavior, and he presents ways people can become less gullible. Greenspan takes us into the vast realm of gullibility from the fictional Pied Piper to the historical Trojan Horse, then through modern-day military maneuvers, political untruths, police and criminal justice scams, and financial and love lies. While there have been earlier books focused on liars and manipulators of all sorts, this is the first to focus on the gullible who are their victims, and how the gullible can become less likely to be taken again.
Download or read book Humans and Other Animals in Eighteenth Century British Culture written by Frank Palmeri and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-07-09 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining historical and interpretive work, this collection examines changing perceptions of and relations between human and nonhuman animals in Britain over the long eighteenth century. Persistent questions concern modes of representing animals and animal-human hybrids, as well as the ethical issues raised by the human uses of other animals. From the animal men of Thomas Rowlandson to the part animal-part human creature of Victor Frankenstein, hybridity serves less as a metaphor than as a metonym for the intersections of humans and other animals. The contributors address such recurring questions as the implications of the Enlightenment project of naming and classifying animals, the equating of non-European races and nonhuman animals in early ethnographic texts, and the desire to distinguish the purely human from the entirely nonhuman animal. Gulliver's Travels and works by Mary and Percy Shelley emerge as key texts for this study. The volume will be of interest to scholars and students who work in animal, colonial, gender, and cultural studies; and will appeal to general readers concerned with the representation of animals and their treatment by humans.
Download or read book Gulliver s Travels written by John Condon Murray and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2001 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gulliver's Travels explores the human need to create order out of chaos through an internal system of knowledge that affirms the subjective self. In this study, I examine how Gulliver integrates elements of knowledge from the native and the host-societies into an operative system of self-knowledge. Gulliver's self-knowledge threatens the status quo within these societies by placing him at the solipsistic center of the narrative, orchestrating his observations to maintain the subjective self. If Gulliver was successfully indoctrinated in England, then why does he exhibit such an imperfect understanding of the complexities that define the principles which shaped Western society? Furthermore, if Gulliver is brainwashed by his hosts, then by what authority does he continually transgress the rules of law that govern their societies? Specifically, why does he knowingly commit acts of disobedience and heresy if he has been successfully indoctrinated into their social systems? My study concludes Gulliver's empirical search for an answer to the question Who am I? fails because he is unable to harmonize subjective truths within the objective world.
Download or read book Roidis and the Borrowed Muse written by Foteini Lika and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2018-10-09 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using diverse sources ranging from hagiographies and historiographies to historical novels and satirical poems, this is the first book-length examination of Emmanouil Roidis’ Pope Joan (1866). Providing a long-overdue and authoritative introduction to the sinuous poetics of one of the most celebrated Modern Greek novels, Roidis and the Borrowed Muse takes in a broad gamut of British writers, from Swift, Sterne and Gibbon to Scott, Macaulay and Byron, and casts a fresh and original eye on the intertextual connections between their work and Roidis’ magnum opus. This comprehensive comparative study will appeal not only to intellectual historians, literary critics and students, but also to scholars of Romanticism and readers interested in the many facets of satire.
Download or read book Redefining the Self written by John Condon Murray and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2001 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this volume examine the conflict of ‘self' in society as a leitmotif in Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher, Joyce's Ulysses, and Pinter's The Dwarfs, The Lover, The Caretaker, and The Homecoming.In his analyses, Murray discusses the ideas of behavioral and ideological conformity in Swift's work. He examines Poe's use of the grotesque to suggest correlations between the moral, physical, and spiritual degeneration of the characters, and the natural decay of their environment. Murray examines passages of dialogue from Pinter's dramas and discusses how the characters within the plays use language to create spatial boundaries to secure their identities by making themselves impervious to the language of their ‘social others.' Murray's final essay concentrates on the use of role-playing and misidentification in Joyce's novel.
Download or read book Eighteenth Century Novel and Contemporary Social Issues written by Stuart Sim and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study introduces readers to the eighteenth-century novel through a consideration of contemporary social issues. Eighteenth-century authors grappled with very similar problems to the ones we face today such as: what motivates a fundamentalist terrorist? What are the justifiable limits of state power? What dangers lie in wait for us when we create life artificially?The book discusses key authors from Aphra Behn in the late seventeenth century to James Hogg in the 1820s, covering the 'long' eighteenth century. It guides readers through the main genres of the period from Realism, Gothic romance and historical romance to proto-science fiction. It also introduces a range of debates around race relations, anti-social behaviour, family values and born-again theology as well as the power of the media, surveillance, political sovereignty and fundamentalist terrorism. Each novel is shown to be directly relevant to some of the most urgent moral issues of our own time.
Download or read book The Genres of Gulliver s Travels written by Frederik N. Smith and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A reevaluation of Swift's masterpiece and a test of the usefulness of examining a text through the perspective of genre. Gulliver is explored from the standpoint of picaresque, history, novel, children's literature, illustrated book, scientific prose, science fiction, philosophical treatise, and satire.
Download or read book The Eighteenth Century written by and published by . This book was released on 1975 with total page 696 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Swift the Book and the Irish Financial Revolution written by Sean D. Moore and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2010-10-15 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2010 Donald Murphy Prize for a Distinguished First Book, American Conference on Irish Studies Renowned as one of the most brilliant satirists ever, Jonathan Swift has long fascinated Hibernophiles beyond the shores of the Emerald Isle. Sean Moore's examination of Swift's writings and the economics behind the distribution of his work elucidates the humorist's crucial role in developing a renewed sense of nationalism among the Irish during the eighteenth century. Taking Swift's Irish satires, such as A Modest Proposal and the Drapier's Letters, as examples of anticolonial discourse, Moore unpacks the author's carefully considered published words and his deliberate drive to liberate the Dublin publishing industry from England's shadow to argue that the writer was doing nothing less than creating a national print media. He points to the actions of Anglo-Irish colonial subjects at the outset of Britain's financial revolution; inspired by Swift's dream of a sovereign Ireland, these men and women harnessed the printing press to disseminate ideas of cultural autonomy and defend the country's economic rights. Doing so, Moore contends, imbued the island with a sense of Irishness that led to a feeling of independence from England and ultimately gave the Irish a surprising degree of financial autonomy. Applying postcolonial, new economic, and book history approaches to eighteenth-century studies, Swift, the Book, and the Irish Financial Revolution effectively links the era's critiques of empire to the financial and legal motives for decolonization. Scholars of colonialism, postcolonialism, Irish studies, Atlantic studies, Swift, and the history of the book will find Moore's eye-opening arguments original and compelling.
Download or read book Curiosity written by Barbara M. Benedict and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this striking social history, Barbara M. Benedict draws on the texts of the early modern period to discover the era's attitudes toward curiosity, a trait we learn was often depicted as an unsavory form of transgression or cultural ambition.
Download or read book Jonathan Swift written by Joseph McMinn and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-07-27 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This biography emphasises the extraordinary versatility and resourcefulness of a lifetime spent serving the public interest with the pen. At the same time, it shows Swift's distinctive love of writing for personal entertainment and diversion, with little or no interest in publication. While remaining a fiercely committed writer, he always tried to preserve, especially in his poetry and letters, a literature dedicated to friendship. Swift's literary career comprises much more than the well-known satires.
Download or read book Swift s Narrative Satires written by Everett Zimmerman and published by . This book was released on 1983 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Swift's Narrative Satires is an analysis of one of the major critical controversies about Swift's works: the relationship of author to text. Everett Zimmerman questions the conventional claim that narrative satire is necessarily a vehicle for conveying final judgments. He maintains instead that Swift requires the reader to search for the principle of authority that validates the satire, thereby implicitly challenging the authority of any author.
