Claude RawsonCambridge University Press, 10/23/2014EAN 9781107034778, ISBN10: 1107034779Hardcover, 316 pages, 22.8 x 15.2 x 2.1 cmLanguage: EnglishJonathan 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 desired. In this magisterial account, Claude Rawson, widely considered the leading Swift scholar of our time, brings together recent work, as well as classic earlier discussions extensively revised, offering fresh insights into Swift's bleak view of human nature, his brilliant wit, and the indignations and self-divisions of his writings and political activism.Introductionnot Timons MannerPart I. Ireland1. Swift, Ireland and the paradoxes of ethnicity2. The injured lady and the drapiera reading of Swift's Irish tractsPart II. Fiction3. The mock-edition revisitedSwift to Mailer4. Gulliver's Travels5. Swift's 'I' narratorsPart III. Poetry6. Rage and raillery and Swiftthe case of Cadenus and Vanessa7. Vanessa as a reader of Gulliver's Travels8. Swift's poetryan overview9. 'I The Lofty Stile Decline'vicissitudes of the 'heroick strain' in Swift's poems10. Savage indignation revisitedSwift, Yeats, and the 'cry' of liberty.
