About the Book
“Contexts” features a generous selection of contemporary materials, among them Swift's letters, autobiographical documents, and personal writings.
“Criticism” provides readers with a wide chronological and thematic range of scholarly interpretations, divided into two sections. The first, “1745–1940,” includes assessments by Henry Fielding, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Makepeace Thackeray, D. H. Lawrence, W. B. Yeats, F. R. Leavis, and André Breton, among others. The second, “After 1940,” is by subject and collects critical discussions of A Tale of the Tub, the poems, the English and Irish politics, and Gulliver’s Travels, by Hugh Kenner, Marcus Walsh, Irvin Ehrenpreis, Penelope Wilson, Derek Mahon, S. J. Connolly, George Orwell, R. S. Crane, Jenny Mezciems, Ian Higgins, and Claude Rawson.
A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.
Table of Contents:
Preface
Introduction
A Note on the Texts
The Texts of The Essential Writings of Jonathan Swift
EARLY SATIRES AND POLITICAL WRITINGS (1704-1711)
A Tale of a Tub
The Battle of the Books
The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit
An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity
The Examiner, no. 16. November 23, 1710
A Short Character of his Excellency Thomas Earl of Wharton
II. PARODIES, HOAXES, SOTTISIERS (1703-1745)
A Meditation Upon a Broom-Stick
Predictions for the Year 1708
The Accomplishment of the First of Mr. Bickerstaff's Predictions
A Vindication of Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq.
The Last Speech and Dying Words of Ebenezor Eilliston from A Compleat Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation Directions to Servants
III. WRITINGS ON IRELAND (1707-1737)
The Story of the Injured Lady and The Answer to the Injured Lady
Sermon, Causes of the Wretched Condition of Ireland
A Letter to a Young Gentleman, Lately entered into Holy Orders
A Letter to a Young Lady, On Her Marriage
Drapier's Letters I
Drapier's Letters IV
A Short View of the State of Ireland
A Modest Proposal
A Proposal for Giving Badges to the Beggars
IV. GULLIVER'S TRAVELS
V. POEMS
Verses Wrote in a Lady's Ivory Table-Book
To Their Excellancies … The Humble Petition of Frances Harris
Baucis and Philemon
A Description of the Morning
A Description of a City Shower
Cadenus and Vanessa
The Author upon Himself
Mary the Cook-Maid's Letter
On Stella's Birth-Day
Phyllis, or The Progress of Love
The Progress of Beauty
The Progress of Poetry
To Stella, Visiting me in my Sickness
To Stella, who collected and transcribed his Poems
Stella's Birth-day
To Stella on Her Birth-day
A Satirical Elegy on the Death of a late Famous General
The Progress of Marriage
Stella's Birth-Day. A great Bottle of Wine, long buried, being that Day dug up
Stella at Wood-Park
To Stella
Prometheus
Stella's Birthday
On Wood the Iron-monger
A Receipt to Restore Stella's Youth
Stella's Birth-day
Clever Tom Clinch going to be hanged
Holyhead. Sept. 25, 1727
Irel.d
Directions for Making a Birth-day Song
A Dialogue between an eminent Lawyer and Dr. Swift Dean of St. Patrick's
Traulus
The Lady's Dressing Room
A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed
Strephon and Chloe
Cassinus and Peter, a Tragical Elegy
To Mr Gay
Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, D.S.P.D.
To a Lady
On Poetry: A Rapsody
The Yahoo's Overthrow
The Legion Club
Contexts
CONTEMPORARY DOCUMENTS, INCLUDING LETTERS, AUTOBIOGRAPHY, AND PERSONAL WRITINGS
From Journal to Stella, Letter VI: Swift to Esther Johnson and Rebecca Dingley, October 10, 1710
From Journal to Stella, Letter XXXII: Swift to Esther Johnson and Rebecca Dingley, October 9, 1711
Swift to Alexander Pope, September 29, 1725
Swift to Alexander Pope, November 26, 1725
Swift to Charles Wogan, July-August 2, 1732
Swift to William Pulteney, Mary 12, 1775
Of Mean and Great Figures
Family of Swift
Death of Mrs. Johnson
Thoughts on Various Subjects
Some thoughts on Free-thinking
Thoughts on Religion
Further Thoughts on Religion
From William Wotton, "Observations upon The Tale of the Tub" (1705)
Alexander Pope, Poems on Gulliver's Travels
Criticism
1745-1940
Henry Fielding [Obituary of Swift]
Samuel Johnson [On A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's Travels]
Samuel Johnson [Life of Swift]
Samuel Taylor Coleridge [on Gulliver's Travels]
Samuel Taylor Coleridge [on Gulliver's Travels]
William Makepeace Thackeray [on Gulliver's Travels and Swift's last days]
D. H. Lawrence [on Swift's Celia]
W. B. Yeats [on Swift, Georgian Ireland, and Stella]
F. R. Leavis * "The Irony of Swift"
André Breton [Swift and Black Humor]
AFTER 1940 AND BY SUBJECT
A TALE OF A TUB
Hugh Kenner * [The Tale and the book]
Marcus Walsh * "Text, ‘Text,' and Swift's Tale of a Tub"
Irvin Ehrenpreis * "The Battle of the Books"
THE POEMS
Peneople Wilson * "Feminism and the Augustans"
Derek Mahon * [On Swift's Poems]
POLITICS (ENGLAND AND IRELAND)
Ian Higgins * "Swift's Politics"
S. J. Connolly * "Swift and Protestant Ireland"
GULLIVER'S TRAVELS
George Orwell * "Politics vs. Literature"
R. S. Crane * "The Houyhnhnms, the Yahoos, and the History of Ideas"
Jenny Mezciens * "Utopia and the ‘Thing which is not'"
Claude Rawson * "Swift's ‘I' Narrators"
Jonathan Swift: A Chronology
Selected Bibliography
About the Author :
Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin, to English parents, in 1667. Educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and Oxford, he was ordained in the Anglican Church in 1795 and later served for more than three decades as Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. In 1704, he published the religious-themed A Tale of a Tub, the first of the trenchantly satirical works on which his reputation rests. Along with his friends Alexander Pope and John Gay, Swift helped make the eighteenth century a golden age of social and political satire in Britain. After a brief stint as a Tory pamphleteer in London, the self-styled Irish patriot returned to Dublin in 1714. In later years, he vented what he called his “savage indignation” in a wide range of literary registers, from the Rabelaisian humor of his masterpiece, Gulliver’s Travels (1726), to the dystopian vision of infanticide in A Modest Proposal (1729). He died in 1745. Claude Rawson is Maynard Mack Professor of English at Yale University. He is the author of God, Gulliver, and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination: 1492–1945, English Satire and the Satire Tradition, and Satire and Sentiment, 1660–1830: Stress Points in the English Augustan Tradition. He is General Editor of the Works of Jonathan Swift (Cambridge University Press) and co-editor, with Ian Higgins, of the Oxford World Classics edition of Gulliver's Travels. Ian Higgins is the author of Swift's Politics: A Study in Disaffection (1994) and Jonathan Swift (2004), and is an editor (with Claude Rawson) of Gulliver's Travels (2005). He is a Reader in English at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia, where he teaches courses on early modern and eighteenth-century literature and on British imperial fiction.
