Jonathan Swift and the Eighteenth-Century Book

Jonathan Swift lived through a period of turbulence and innovation in the evolution of the book. His publications, perhaps more than those of any other single author, illustrate the range of developments that transformed print culture during the early Enlightenment. Swift was a prolific author and a frequent visitor at the printing house, and he wrote as critic and satirist about the nature of text. The shifting moods of irony, complicity and indignation that characterise his dealings with the book trade add a layer of complexity to the bibliographic record of his published works. The essays collected here offer the first comprehensive, integrated survey of that record. They shed new light on the politics of the eighteenth-century book trade, on Swift's innovations as a maker of books, on the habits and opinions revealed by his commentary on printed texts and on the re-shaping of the Swiftian book after his death.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Paddy Bullard and James McLaverty; Part I. Swift's Books and their Environment: 1. Swift as a manuscript poet Stephen Karian; 2. Leaving the printer to his liberty: Swift and the London book trade, 1701–14 Ian Gadd; 3. What Swift did in libraries Paddy Bullard; Part II. Some Species of Swiftian Book: 4. The uses of the miscellany: Swift, Curll, and piracy Pat Rogers; 5. Swift's Tale of a Tub and the mock book Marcus Walsh; 6. Epistolary forms: published correspondence, letter-journals and books Abigail Williams; 7. Exploring the bibliographical limits of Gulliver's Travels Shef Rogers; 8. George Faulkner and Swift's collected works James McLaverty; Part III. Swift's Books in their Broader Context: 9. Censorship, libel and self-censorship Ian Higgins; 10. Swift's texts between Dublin and London Adam Rounce; 11. Publishing posthumous Swift: Dean Swift to Walter Scott Daniel Cook; 12. The mock-edition revisited: Swift to Mailer Claude Rawson.

About the Author :
Paddy Bullard is lecturer in eighteenth-century studies at the University of Kent, Canterbury. From January 2005 to December 2009 he was an AHRC Research Fellow attached to the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift and Rank Junior Research Fellow at St Catherine's College, Oxford. He is the author of Edmund Burke and the Art of Rhetoric (Cambridge, 2011). James McLaverty is Emeritus Professor of Textual Criticism at Keele University. With David Womersley he was one of the principal investigators on the AHRC-funded 'Textual Edition and Archive of the Works of Jonathan Swift' (2005–10) and served as one of the general editors of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift from 2005 to 2009. He is the author of Pope, Print, and Meaning (2001).

Review :
'Swiftians and book-history addicts will find something novel and stimulating in each chapter of this enjoyable book; I can also highly recommend the introduction, by the joint editors James McLaverty and Paddy Bullard. This is a masterpiece of elegant, succinct scholarship that indicates the relationship between the themes covered in the book, showing the range of original scholarship behind the Swift Works project and the value of the textual editing even of well-known texts. The Swift who emerges from these pages - obsessive maker of books, crafty manipulator of bookmen and publishing methods, mischievous exploiter of multiple authorial and editorial voices - was a key figure in the burgeoning publishing culture in England and Ireland in the early eighteenth century. This beautifully-produced volume not only reminds one of his significance but, in itself, of the value of the original scholarship that underpins serious textual editing.' Andrew Carpenter, SHARP News