Swiftian Inspirations

This book addresses key problems regarding Swiftian thought and satire, analyzing the inspirational cultural legacy which generations of writers, thinkers, and satirists have recurrently relied upon since the Enlightenment. Section One deals with the eighteenth century and the topics of truth, falsehood and madness. Section Two focuses on two film adaptations of Gulliver’s Travels as well as on allusions to Swiftian satire during the US Enlightenment and in post-racial America. Section Three looks at the politics of language, politeness, and satire within translation, and Section Four dwells upon the process of reading Swift in the age of post-truth and Brexit. It will be of interest to students and scholars of eighteenth-century literature and culture, modern-day politics as well as to those interested in satire, science fiction, and film adaptations of literary works.

How do young scholars from the Arab world interact with English literature? Is literature relevant to their life? Can it help shape their reality? Is this affiliation new, or is there a pattern? This book poses some answers to these questions and more; it is ideal for university students and young intellectuals who seek further insight into world literature and literary theory. As this book shows, strong and courageous voices from the past, voices that transcend time and space, like Swift’s, must remain alive in the departments of English and world literature in this wasteland of globalization - a world dominated by cold science, materialism, and conflict. There is need for Swift to haunt us, for his ghost to wake us to the truth. Anarchist, anti-colonialist, nay-sayer, champion of the oppressed and conscious of the plight of women, Swift is the ultimate “therapeutic ironist”; what more can a pen do?

Re-Reading the Eighteenth-Century Novel adds to the dynamically developing subfield of reception studies within eighteenth-century studies. Lipski shows how secondary visual and literary texts live their own lives in new contexts, while being also attentive to the possible ways in which these new lives may tell us more about the source texts. To this end the book offers five case studies of how canonical novels of the eighteenth century by Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne came to be interpreted by readers from different historical moments. Lipski prioritises responses that may seem non-standard or even disconnected from the original, appreciating difference as a gateway to unobvious territories, as well as expressing doubts regarding readings that verge on misinterpretative appropriation. The material encompasses textual and visual testimonies of reading, including book illustration, prints and drawings, personal documents, reviews, literary texts and literary criticism. The case studies are arranged into three sections: visual transvaluations, reception in Poland and critical afterlives, and are concluded by a discussion of the most recent socio-political uses and revisions of eighteenth-century fiction in the Age of Trump (2016–2020).

This book addresses key problems regarding Swiftian thought and satire, analyzing the inspirational cultural legacy which generations of writers, thinkers and satirists have recurrently relied upon since the Enlightenment. Section One deals with the eighteenth-century and the topics of truth, falsehood and madness. Section Two focuses on two film adaptations of Gulliverâ (TM)s Travels, as well as allusions to Swiftian satire during the US Enlightenment and in post-racial America. The third part looks at the politics of language, politeness and satire within translation, and Section Four dwells upon the process of reading Swift in the age of post-truth and Brexit. It will be of interest to students and scholars of eighteenth-century literature and culture, modern-day politics, as well as to those interested in satire, science fiction, and film adaptations of literary works.

Contributions by GerShun Avilez, Lola Boorman, Thomas Britt, John Brooks, Phillip James Martinez Cortes, Derek DiMatteo, Tikenya Foster-Singletary, Alexandra Glavanakova, Erica-Brittany Horhn, Matthias Klestil, Abigail Jinju Lee, Derek C. Maus, Danielle Fuentes Morgan, Derek Conrad Murray, Kinohi Nishikawa, Sarah O'Brien, Keyana Parks, and Emily Ruth Rutter The seventeen essays in Greater Atlanta: Black Satire after Obama collectively argue that in the years after the widespread hopefulness surrounding Barack Obama’s election as president waned, Black satire began to reveal a profound shift in US culture. Using the four seasons of the FX television show Atlanta (2016–22) as a springboard, the collection examines more than a dozen novels, films, and television shows that together reveal the ways in which Black satire has developed in response to contemporary cultural dynamics. Contributors reveal increased scorn toward self-proclaimed allies in the existential struggle still facing African Americans today. Having started its production within a few weeks of Donald Trump’s (in)famous escalator ride in 2015, Atlanta in many ways is the perfect commentary on the absurdities of the contemporary cultural moment. The series exemplifies a significant development in contemporary Black satire, which largely eschews expectations of reform and instead offers an exasperated self-affirmation that echoes the declaration that Black Lives Matter. Given anti-Black racism’s lengthy history, overt stimuli for outrage have predictably commanded African American satirists’ attention through the years. However, more recent works emphasize the willful ignorance underlying that history. As the volume shows, this has led to the exposure of performative allyship, virtue signaling, slacktivism, and other duplicitous forms of purported support as empty, oblivious gestures that ultimately harm African Americans as grievously as unconcealed bigotry.

This book contributes to the development of contemporary historical fiction studies by analysing neo-Georgian fiction, which, unlike neo-Victorian fiction, has so far received little critical attention. The essays included in this collection study the ways in which the selected twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels recreate the Georgian period in order to view its ideologies through the lens of such modern critical theories as performativity, post-colonialism, feminism or visual theories. They also demonstrate the rich repertoire of subgenres of neo-Georgian fiction, ranging from biographical fiction, epistolary novels to magical realism. The included studies of the diverse novelistic conventions used to re-contextualise the Georgian reality reflect the way we see its relevance and relation to the present and trace the indebtedness of the new forms of the contemporary novel to the traditional novelistic genres.

Swift's Landscape argues for a fundamental reevaluation of Jonathan Swift's place in eighteenth-century literary history. Combining history, biography, and literary criticism, Carole Fabricant restores both Swift's life and his writings to their proper landscape - by emphasizing the influence of the author's Irish involvements and environs on his work.

This classic study of the structure of Swift s works, first published by Yale University Press in 1953 and reissued by Archon Books in 1963, is here brought back into print in paperback form.Price s brilliant essay is concerned principally with structure as it serves to create meaning, but he deals with the large themes of Swift s major works and gives an overview of Swift s work as a whole. It thus provides a useful emphasis to an adequate reading of Swift and suggests new relations between his works and that of other periods."

This study investigates the stylistic affinities between Jonathan Swift and James Joyce, in particular those resemblances which are present in their earlier works--A Tale of a Tub, The Battel of the Books, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It demonstrates that both Swift and Joyce use similar literary devices in their work to enliven it and make it exuberant. Some of those devices are personification, zoomorphism, synesthesia, auditory implication, juxtaposition, amplification, anthropomorphism, and an abundant incorporation of kinesthetic language. Moreover, Swift and Joyce abjure the temporal and structural approaches to most novelistic literature that render slow-moving plot and ordinary language. They instead create episodic movements and quick changes, at even the sentence level, to make their work vivified, vibrant, and exciting. Additionally, this thesis indicates when James Joyce became interested in Swift as a writer--because he was not always so--and pinpoints the timeframe where Swiftian influence may have driven him to make alterations to his own writing style. While other scholars have shown that Swift's influence is readily apparent in Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, this thesis will show that that influence may well have come earlier. Finally, this thesis tracks the numerous personal similarities between these two great authors, including their significant hardships, arrogance, and brilliance, which may have some bearing on why Joyce felt a kinship with Swift and why he was a personal hero and inspiration to him.

The book bridges disciplines-24 journals in literature, history, science, medicine, philosophy, religion and Ireland have acclaimed this classic fascinating, extraordinarily well-informed, careful and encyclopedic. "Craven reminds us of Swift's uncanny foreknowledge that democratic governments tend toward a populace inundated by false information it cannot process, and leaders intent only upon power and the deceptions by which it is gained."-Melvyn New "This new edition situates Swift's early masterpiece in its most resonant possible context - its savage critique of John Locke, whose life and philosophical work simultaneously served to legitimate government by popular sovereignty and to countenance colonial violence and slavery."-Clement Hawes