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Author: Deborah Baker Wyrick Publisher: UNC Press Books ISBN: 9780807817803 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 278
Book Description
In Jonathan Swift and the Vested Word, Deborah Wyrick argues that modern Continental and American literary theory is "tantalizingly applicable to Swiftian texts." Its applicability, she writes, "stems from Swift's interest in and exploration of what are now though of as phenomenological, structuralist, poststructuralist, and new historicist concerns: how a life in language comes into being, how semiotic systems determine meaning, how texts open up their own systems to other texts and to multiple interpretations." Wyrick investigates Swift's confrontations with three theories of language current in his day, theories that locate meaning in the thing named, in the idea behind the word, or in the response of the audience. She concludes that Swift fashioned a fourth theory of meaning, one that locates meaning in and among words themselves. Because of his fear of the anarchic potential of language, Swift attempted to invest his words with extratextual authority; yet a powerful counterforce was his desire to exploit the possibilities of language divested of stable significance. These divestitures, particularly the word-play and language games, ultimately served serious personal and social purposes. A crucial personal purpose was Swift's ability to create a textual self, which he did, Wyrick maintains, by constructing defensive transvestitures centered on clothes and money. These parallel sign systems produced Swift's greatest achievement in using the resources of language and history to effect political action. By using the entire Swift canon -- poems and prose narratives, letters and essays, sermons and satires -- Wyrick presents Swift's struggle with the inadequacies of language and its inability to answer the tremendous demands he made upon it. Originally published 1988. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
Author: Deborah Baker Wyrick Publisher: UNC Press Books ISBN: 9780807817803 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 278
Book Description
In Jonathan Swift and the Vested Word, Deborah Wyrick argues that modern Continental and American literary theory is "tantalizingly applicable to Swiftian texts." Its applicability, she writes, "stems from Swift's interest in and exploration of what are now though of as phenomenological, structuralist, poststructuralist, and new historicist concerns: how a life in language comes into being, how semiotic systems determine meaning, how texts open up their own systems to other texts and to multiple interpretations." Wyrick investigates Swift's confrontations with three theories of language current in his day, theories that locate meaning in the thing named, in the idea behind the word, or in the response of the audience. She concludes that Swift fashioned a fourth theory of meaning, one that locates meaning in and among words themselves. Because of his fear of the anarchic potential of language, Swift attempted to invest his words with extratextual authority; yet a powerful counterforce was his desire to exploit the possibilities of language divested of stable significance. These divestitures, particularly the word-play and language games, ultimately served serious personal and social purposes. A crucial personal purpose was Swift's ability to create a textual self, which he did, Wyrick maintains, by constructing defensive transvestitures centered on clothes and money. These parallel sign systems produced Swift's greatest achievement in using the resources of language and history to effect political action. By using the entire Swift canon -- poems and prose narratives, letters and essays, sermons and satires -- Wyrick presents Swift's struggle with the inadequacies of language and its inability to answer the tremendous demands he made upon it. Originally published 1988. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
Author: A. C. Elias Publisher: Rutgers University Press ISBN: 1644530260 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 265
Book Description
This Word-Book is presumably the only work of Jonathan Swift’s not in print, until now. Since the 1690s, Swift had been formulating a list of words and definitions for his protégé Esther Johnson, beginning with terms from the Book of Common Prayer. His was apparently an ongoing list, kept rather haphazardly, with open spaces for adding new words. About 1710, when Swift was in London, Johnson, in Dublin, set out to formalize the dictionary, copying out Swift’s words and definitions to make an orderly and careful book with no blank spaces. Probably in 1713, when Swift returned to Ireland, Johnson presented her Word-Book to him, but his school-masterly corrections of her work may have offended her. After Johnson’s death in 1728, Swift gave the Word-Book to their mutual friend, Elizabeth Sican. It was passed down over generations, until in 1976, the young American Swiftian A. C. Elias, Jr., bought it, intending to edit it in his old age. Before his early death in 2008, Elias asked John Fischer to assume the challenge of bringing the book into print. Fischer took on the task until 2015, when he too passed away, after which his wife Panthea Reid completed the task. This volume includes illustrations from the original book, a transcript of it with schematic indications of Swift’s corrections, as well as essays and appendices by Fischer and Elias tracing provenance, exploring the social and psychological milieu in which the book was written, and tracking Swift’s work as a lexicographer. Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Author: Leo Damrosch Publisher: Yale University Press ISBN: 0300164998 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 587
Book Description
Draws on discoveries made in the past three decades to paint a new portrait of the satirist, speculating on his parentage, love life, and relationships while claiming that the public image he projected was intentionally misleading.
Author: Eugene Hammond Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 1611496071 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 823
Book Description
Jonathan Swift: Irish Blow-in (along with its companion, Jonathan Swift: Our Dean) aspires to be the most accurate and engaging critical biography of Jonathan Swift ever published. It builds on the thorough research of Irvin Ehrenpreis’s highly regarded 1962–1983 three-volume biography, but reinterprets Swift’s life and works by reassessing his childhood, stressing his exuberance, honestly portraying his intense affection for Esther Johnson (he called her “saucebox” and not “Stella” when she was in her twenties), and not projecting Swift’s later-in-life angry behavior back onto his first forty-seven years.
Author: John Stubbs Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company ISBN: 0393634159 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 840
Book Description
A rich and riveting portrait of the man behind Gulliver’s Travels, by a “vivid, ardent, and engaging” (New York Times Book Review) author. One of Europe’s most important literary figures, Jonathan Swift was also an inspired humorist, a beloved companion, and a conscientious Anglican minister—as well as a hoaxer and a teller of tales. His anger against abuses of power would produce the most famous satires of the English language: Gulliver’s Travels as well as the Drapier Papers and the unparalleled Modest Proposal, in which he imagined the poor of Ireland farming their infants for the tables of wealthy colonists. John Stubbs’s biography captures the dirt and beauty of a world that Swift both scorned and sought to amend. It follows Swift through his many battles, for and against authority, and in his many contradictions, as a priest who sought to uphold the dogma of his church; as a man who was quite prepared to defy convention, not least in his unshakable attachment to an unmarried woman, his “Stella”; and as a writer whose vision showed that no single creed holds all the answers. Impeccably researched and beautifully told, in Jonathan Swift Stubbs has found the perfect subject for this masterfully told biography of a reluctant rebel—a voice of withering disenchantment unrivaled in English.
Author: Robert McCrum Publisher: ISBN: 9781903385838 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Beginning in 1611 with the King James Bible and ending in 2014 with Elizabeth Kolbert's 'The Sixth Extinction', this extraordinary voyage through the written treasures of our culture examines universally-acclaimed classics such as Pepys' 'Diaries', Charles Darwin's 'The Origin of Species', Stephen Hawking's 'A Brief History of Time' and a whole host of additional works --
Author: Sean D. Moore Publisher: JHU Press ISBN: 0801899249 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 286
Book Description
Winner, 2010 Donald Murphy Prize for a Distinguished First Book, American Conference on Irish Studies Renowned as one of the most brilliant satirists ever, Jonathan Swift has long fascinated Hibernophiles beyond the shores of the Emerald Isle. Sean Moore's examination of Swift's writings and the economics behind the distribution of his work elucidates the humorist's crucial role in developing a renewed sense of nationalism among the Irish during the eighteenth century. Taking Swift's Irish satires, such as A Modest Proposal and the Drapier's Letters, as examples of anticolonial discourse, Moore unpacks the author's carefully considered published words and his deliberate drive to liberate the Dublin publishing industry from England's shadow to argue that the writer was doing nothing less than creating a national print media. He points to the actions of Anglo-Irish colonial subjects at the outset of Britain's financial revolution; inspired by Swift's dream of a sovereign Ireland, these men and women harnessed the printing press to disseminate ideas of cultural autonomy and defend the country's economic rights. Doing so, Moore contends, imbued the island with a sense of Irishness that led to a feeling of independence from England and ultimately gave the Irish a surprising degree of financial autonomy. Applying postcolonial, new economic, and book history approaches to eighteenth-century studies, Swift, the Book, and the Irish Financial Revolution effectively links the era's critiques of empire to the financial and legal motives for decolonization. Scholars of colonialism, postcolonialism, Irish studies, Atlantic studies, Swift, and the history of the book will find Moore's eye-opening arguments original and compelling.
Author: Jonathan Swift Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 28
Book Description
A Modest Proposal For preventing the Children of Poor People From being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and For making them Beneficial to the Publick, commonly referred to as A Modest Proposal, is a Juvenalian satirical essay written and published anonymously by Jonathan Swift in 1729. The essay suggests that the impoverished Irish might ease their economic troubles by selling their children as food to rich gentlemen and ladies. This satirical hyperbole mocked heartless attitudes towards the poor, as well as British policy toward the Irish in general.
Author: Deborah Baker Wyrick
Author: Deborah Baker Wyrick
Author: A. C. Elias
Author: Leo Damrosch
Author: Eugene Hammond
Author: John Stubbs
Author: Jonathan Swift
Author: Robert McCrum
Author: Sean D. Moore
Author: Jonathan Swift
Author: Jonathan Swift