A wide range of new approaches to Swift's literary and political achievement in its English and Irish contexts.

Essays by twenty-nine leading scholars and critics on the best English poets from Chaucer to Larkin.

Jonathan Swift's angers were all too real, though Swift was temperamentally equivocal about their display. Even in his most brilliant satire, A Tale of a Tub, the aggressive vitality of the narrative is designed, for all the intensity of its sting, never to lose its cool. Yet Swift's angers are partly self-implicating, since his own temperament was close to the things he attacked, and behind his angers are deep self-divisions. Though he regarded himself as 'English' and despised the Irish 'natives' over whom the English ruled, Swift became the hero of an Irish independence he would not have...

Jonathan Swift was the most influential political commentator of his time, in both England and Ireland. His writings are a major source for historians of the eighteenth century, as well as including some of the greatest works of satire in verse and prose. This volume presents wide-ranging new perspectives on Swift's literary and political achievement in its English and Irish contexts, bringing together some of the most energetic current scholarship on the subject in both historical and literary studies. The essays consider Swift's attitude to Dissenters, his relationship with Walpole, and his...