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The Essential Writings of Jonathan Swift: A Norton Critical Edition
This Norton Critical Edition is the fullest single-volume collection of Jonathan Swift's writings, encompassing not only the major prose satires― A Tale of the Tub , Gulliver’s Travels , and A Modest Proposal ―but also a large number of other works, including his most important poems and political writings. The texts are accompanied by detailed explanatory annotations by Ian Higgins, thirty illustrations, and a full introduction by Claude Rawson. This is an indispensable edition for scholar and student alike. “Contexts” features a generous selection of contemporary materials, among them Swift's letters, autobiographical documents, and personal writings.
“Criticism” provides readers with a wide chronological and thematic range of scholarly interpretations, divided into two sections. The first, “1745–1940,” includes assessments by Henry Fielding, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Makepeace Thackeray, D. H. Lawrence, W. B. Yeats, F. R. Leavis, and André Breton, among others. The second, “After 1940,” is by subject and collects critical discussions of A Tale of the Tub , the poems, the English and Irish politics, and Gulliver’s Travels , by Hugh Kenner, Marcus Walsh, Irvin Ehrenpreis, Penelope Wilson, Derek Mahon, S. J. Connolly, George Orwell, R. S. Crane, Jenny Mezciems, Ian Higgins, and Claude Rawson.
A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included. 1 map, illustrations
“Criticism” provides readers with a wide chronological and thematic range of scholarly interpretations, divided into two sections. The first, “1745–1940,” includes assessments by Henry Fielding, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Makepeace Thackeray, D. H. Lawrence, W. B. Yeats, F. R. Leavis, and André Breton, among others. The second, “After 1940,” is by subject and collects critical discussions of A Tale of the Tub , the poems, the English and Irish politics, and Gulliver’s Travels , by Hugh Kenner, Marcus Walsh, Irvin Ehrenpreis, Penelope Wilson, Derek Mahon, S. J. Connolly, George Orwell, R. S. Crane, Jenny Mezciems, Ian Higgins, and Claude Rawson.
A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included. 1 map, illustrations
422 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2009
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About the author
Jonathan Swift
4,896 books2,151 followersJonathan Swift was an Anglo-Irish satirist, author, essayist, political pamphleteer (first for the Whigs, then for the Tories), poet, and Anglican cleric who became Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, hence his common sobriquet, "Dean Swift".
Swift is remembered for works such as A Tale of a Tub (1704), An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1712), Gulliver's Travels (1726), and A Modest Proposal (1729). He is regarded by the Encyclopædia Britannica as the foremost prose satirist in the English language. He originally published all of his works under pseudonyms—such as Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff, M.B. Drapier—or anonymously. He was a master of two styles of satire, the Horatian and Juvenalian styles.
His deadpan, ironic writing style, particularly in A Modest Proposal, has led to such satire being subsequently termed "Swiftian".
Swift is remembered for works such as A Tale of a Tub (1704), An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1712), Gulliver's Travels (1726), and A Modest Proposal (1729). He is regarded by the Encyclopædia Britannica as the foremost prose satirist in the English language. He originally published all of his works under pseudonyms—such as Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff, M.B. Drapier—or anonymously. He was a master of two styles of satire, the Horatian and Juvenalian styles.
His deadpan, ironic writing style, particularly in A Modest Proposal, has led to such satire being subsequently termed "Swiftian".
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
January 9, 2022
This is an essential book for navigating the writing of Jonathan Swift. It’s not a one stop shop but it’s pretty dang close to it. I used this to primarily supplement my reading of Tale of a Tub, as all the criticisms and reviews at the back of the book are very well picked to help illuminate and traverse his writing.
This publication looks to be one of the books that are forced upon literature majors studying Swift at university, but I think it’s a pretty valuable book to anyone wanting access to the majority of his works as it provides very helpful footnotes as well. You know what they say, if a college freshman lit major can read it, anyone can.
Taking his work in aggregate though, Swift was equally parts funny and odd. Not totally sure how I feel about his writing on the whole (though it’s difficult to detach the man from his works), as it definitely started on the funny side, his best works being found early on in his writing career. However, as his later works were still humorous, they left me more unsettled. He was becoming insane, which clearly started to emerge in these later works, George Orwell thinking this started to emerge in Part 4 of Gulliver’s Travels. The end of his life was actually pretty sad, he seemed to be alone quite a lot in his life – which might be why he seemingly ends up being quite misanthropic.
In hindsight, I would have liked to intersperse reading his works throughout other books on my list, as opposed to reading most of his work in one go. I think that’s why reading him felt like I ate too much chocolate.
This book really helped me engage more with his writing, as it’s very active work, especially when reading the Tale. I know I said this before but I found the reviews, specifically Marcus Walsh’s review, very helpful, as he gave about a 20 page synopsis of Christian differences between written and oral tradition and modern literary criticism – this was actually great. It’s a review that I would want to read with a group of friends and chat about. George Orwell’s review of Gulliver’s Travels was also quite good - as you can see most of the quotes below are pulled from these two.
My Top 5 Swift Works:
1. The Battle of the Books
2. A Tale of a Tub
3. The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit
4. Meditation Upon a Broomstick
5. Gulliver’s Travels
Quotes:
- the man who writes a marginal comment is conducting a dialogue with the text he is reading; but the man who composes a footnote, and sends it to the printer along with the text, has discovered among the devices of printed language something analogous with counterpoint: a way of speaking in two voices at once, or of ballasting or modifying or even bombarding with exceptions his own discourse without interrupting it. It is a step in the direction of discontinuity: of organizing blocks of discourse simultaneously in space rather than consecutively in time.
- Anglicans [opposing Roman Catholicism] resisted this privileging of the spoken word. Writing is neither an accident nor a substitute, but original, apostolic, fully equal to speech.
- E.D. Hirsch, who, though he accepts that ‘meaning is an affair of consciousness’ and that ‘the text does not exist even as a sequence of words until it is construed’, none the less insists that an author’s text embodies a determinate, self-identical, bounded meaning.
- Forms of the argument that truth and life in here in spoken language, whereas writing is necessarily dead and incapable of explaining itself, go back to Plato’s Phaedrus… Written discourses, consisting merely of ink marks, are no more than the ‘shadow’ of ‘living and animate speech of a man with knowledge’. St Paul platonizes, influentially, in 2 Corinthians 3.6: ‘The letter killeth, but the spirit [pneuma] giveth life.’
- The Protestant Nephew replies that, in all those parts of scripture which belong ‘to faith and good manners’ the sense is inherent and clear; such passages ‘carry their meaning in their foreheads’. Later in the century Tillotson similarly rejected Sergeant’s premise ‘that [protestants] cannot by the Scriptures mean the Sense of them but the book’. Just as books of statute law can sufficiently convey knowledge to men, so Scripture can sufficiently convey Christ’s doctrine; sense is inherent in both. Protestants ‘mean by the Scriptures, Books written in such words as do sufficiently express the sense and meaning of Christ’s Doctrine’.
- Peter is ‘the scholastick brother’, not merely because he applies perverse ingenuity to particularly interpretative cruces but because he is characteristically a scholastic commentator, heir to a tradition which decentralizes and destabilizes scripture. For Peter, his scholia replace the text itself; he allows no appeal beyond his subjective interpretation to any objective, publicly accessible truth.
- The fable therefore provides an early example of one of Swift’s most characteristic and effective devices: to pick up some commonplace distinctions, embody them in ‘naturally’ appropriate creatures, and dramatize the resulting juxtaposition in a comic scene with dialogue. He tells no story but brings home the ironies implicit in the cliches. To this genre belong the fat man and the weaver in the Preface to A Tale of a Tub
- (George Orwell on Gulliver’s Travels) is there not something familiar in the phrase ‘I could never discover the least analogy between the two sciences’? It has precisely the note of the popular Catholic apologists who profess to be astonished when a scientist utters an opinion on such questions as the existence of God or the immortality of the soul. The scientist, we are told, is an expert only in one restricted field: why should his opinions be of value in any other? The implication is that theology is just as much an exact science as, for instance, chemistry, and that the priest is also an expert whose conclusions on certain subjects must be accepted.
- Other professors at the same school invent simplified languages, write books by machinery, educate, their pupils by inscribing the lesson on a wafer and causing them to swallow it, or propose to abolish individuality altogether by cutting off part of the brain of one man and grafting it on to the head of another. There is something queerly familiar in the atmosphere of these chapters, because, mixed up with much fooling, there is a perception that one of the aims of totalitarianism is not merely to make sure that people will think the right thoughts, but actually to make them less conscious.
- Gulliver’s master is somewhat unwilling to obey, but the ‘exhortation’ cannot be disregarded. This illustrates very well the totalitarian tendency which is implicit in the anarchist or pacifist vision of Society. In a Society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behavior is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law. When human beings are governed by ‘thou shalt not’, the individual can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by ‘love’ or ‘reason’, he is under continuous pressure to make him behave and think In exactly the same way as everyone else.
This publication looks to be one of the books that are forced upon literature majors studying Swift at university, but I think it’s a pretty valuable book to anyone wanting access to the majority of his works as it provides very helpful footnotes as well. You know what they say, if a college freshman lit major can read it, anyone can.
Taking his work in aggregate though, Swift was equally parts funny and odd. Not totally sure how I feel about his writing on the whole (though it’s difficult to detach the man from his works), as it definitely started on the funny side, his best works being found early on in his writing career. However, as his later works were still humorous, they left me more unsettled. He was becoming insane, which clearly started to emerge in these later works, George Orwell thinking this started to emerge in Part 4 of Gulliver’s Travels. The end of his life was actually pretty sad, he seemed to be alone quite a lot in his life – which might be why he seemingly ends up being quite misanthropic.
In hindsight, I would have liked to intersperse reading his works throughout other books on my list, as opposed to reading most of his work in one go. I think that’s why reading him felt like I ate too much chocolate.
This book really helped me engage more with his writing, as it’s very active work, especially when reading the Tale. I know I said this before but I found the reviews, specifically Marcus Walsh’s review, very helpful, as he gave about a 20 page synopsis of Christian differences between written and oral tradition and modern literary criticism – this was actually great. It’s a review that I would want to read with a group of friends and chat about. George Orwell’s review of Gulliver’s Travels was also quite good - as you can see most of the quotes below are pulled from these two.
My Top 5 Swift Works:
1. The Battle of the Books
2. A Tale of a Tub
3. The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit
4. Meditation Upon a Broomstick
5. Gulliver’s Travels
Quotes:
- the man who writes a marginal comment is conducting a dialogue with the text he is reading; but the man who composes a footnote, and sends it to the printer along with the text, has discovered among the devices of printed language something analogous with counterpoint: a way of speaking in two voices at once, or of ballasting or modifying or even bombarding with exceptions his own discourse without interrupting it. It is a step in the direction of discontinuity: of organizing blocks of discourse simultaneously in space rather than consecutively in time.
- Anglicans [opposing Roman Catholicism] resisted this privileging of the spoken word. Writing is neither an accident nor a substitute, but original, apostolic, fully equal to speech.
- E.D. Hirsch, who, though he accepts that ‘meaning is an affair of consciousness’ and that ‘the text does not exist even as a sequence of words until it is construed’, none the less insists that an author’s text embodies a determinate, self-identical, bounded meaning.
- Forms of the argument that truth and life in here in spoken language, whereas writing is necessarily dead and incapable of explaining itself, go back to Plato’s Phaedrus… Written discourses, consisting merely of ink marks, are no more than the ‘shadow’ of ‘living and animate speech of a man with knowledge’. St Paul platonizes, influentially, in 2 Corinthians 3.6: ‘The letter killeth, but the spirit [pneuma] giveth life.’
- The Protestant Nephew replies that, in all those parts of scripture which belong ‘to faith and good manners’ the sense is inherent and clear; such passages ‘carry their meaning in their foreheads’. Later in the century Tillotson similarly rejected Sergeant’s premise ‘that [protestants] cannot by the Scriptures mean the Sense of them but the book’. Just as books of statute law can sufficiently convey knowledge to men, so Scripture can sufficiently convey Christ’s doctrine; sense is inherent in both. Protestants ‘mean by the Scriptures, Books written in such words as do sufficiently express the sense and meaning of Christ’s Doctrine’.
- Peter is ‘the scholastick brother’, not merely because he applies perverse ingenuity to particularly interpretative cruces but because he is characteristically a scholastic commentator, heir to a tradition which decentralizes and destabilizes scripture. For Peter, his scholia replace the text itself; he allows no appeal beyond his subjective interpretation to any objective, publicly accessible truth.
- The fable therefore provides an early example of one of Swift’s most characteristic and effective devices: to pick up some commonplace distinctions, embody them in ‘naturally’ appropriate creatures, and dramatize the resulting juxtaposition in a comic scene with dialogue. He tells no story but brings home the ironies implicit in the cliches. To this genre belong the fat man and the weaver in the Preface to A Tale of a Tub
- (George Orwell on Gulliver’s Travels) is there not something familiar in the phrase ‘I could never discover the least analogy between the two sciences’? It has precisely the note of the popular Catholic apologists who profess to be astonished when a scientist utters an opinion on such questions as the existence of God or the immortality of the soul. The scientist, we are told, is an expert only in one restricted field: why should his opinions be of value in any other? The implication is that theology is just as much an exact science as, for instance, chemistry, and that the priest is also an expert whose conclusions on certain subjects must be accepted.
- Other professors at the same school invent simplified languages, write books by machinery, educate, their pupils by inscribing the lesson on a wafer and causing them to swallow it, or propose to abolish individuality altogether by cutting off part of the brain of one man and grafting it on to the head of another. There is something queerly familiar in the atmosphere of these chapters, because, mixed up with much fooling, there is a perception that one of the aims of totalitarianism is not merely to make sure that people will think the right thoughts, but actually to make them less conscious.
- Gulliver’s master is somewhat unwilling to obey, but the ‘exhortation’ cannot be disregarded. This illustrates very well the totalitarian tendency which is implicit in the anarchist or pacifist vision of Society. In a Society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behavior is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law. When human beings are governed by ‘thou shalt not’, the individual can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by ‘love’ or ‘reason’, he is under continuous pressure to make him behave and think In exactly the same way as everyone else.
January 13, 2021
Jonathan Swift was a weird dude… read for ENG class & my professor had an interesting observation about Gulliver's Travels that stuck w me… "writing about other places was always about home"
February 19, 2018
"Tale of a Tub" is incandescent, the rest maybe not so much. Very fun to read though.
Read
January 22, 2021Obviously, this was for class. I enjoyed the poetry more than the narratives. Interesting writer.
April 19, 2012
This book contains everything the Swift student needs to have a hilarious (and occasionally heartbreaking) reading experience. All of his important writings are included, from A Tale of a Tub and the devotional poetry to Gulliver's Travels and beyond.
July 15, 2017
Very comprehensive selection of Swift's writings and criticism.
Read
March 31, 2012"A Modest Proposal" is in here and I loved that essay, especially.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews