It is thought that Swift was opposed to the new science that heralded the beginning of the modern age, but this book interrogates that assumption, tracing the theological, political, and socio-cultural resonances of scientific knowledge in the early eighteenth century, and considering what they can reveal about Swift's imagination.

This collection of twelve essays by colleagues, students, and friends of Everett Zimmerman treats four topics that Zimmerman explored during his career: the representation of the self in narratives, the early British novel and related forms, their epistemological and generic borders, and their intellectual and cultural contexts. The collection is divided into two sections: Boundaries and Forms. The essays in Boundaries explore how epistemological and narrative distinctions between history and fiction meet or overlap in the novel's relationship to other forms, including providential history, travel narratives, uptopias, autobiography, and visual art. In Forms, the contributors investigate fictional, historical, and material forms; the impact those cultural phenomena had on the meaning and value attributed to literary works; and how such forms arose in response to historical conditions. The essays describe the historical range of Zimmerman's work, beginning with Defoe and ending with Coetzee, and treat such key writers of the long eighteenth century as Fielding, Richardson, Walpole, Austen, and Scott. Bakersfield. Robert Mayer is Professor of English and Director of the Screen Studies Program at Oklahoma State University.

Sometime toward the middle of 1689, a twenty­one-year-old Irishman named Jonathan Swift entered the employ of Sir William Temple, an essayist and retired diplomat. Swift spent most of the next decade working as secretary at Moor Park, Temple's country house in Surrey. When he left in 1699, he was already a satirist of exceptional power. Drawing upon considerable new documentary evidence, Swift at Moor Park represents the most exhaustive study yet published about this formative period in Swift's literary career and challenges traditional assumptions and conclusions concerning those years. A. C. Elias begins with the work Swift actually did as Temple's secretary-amanuensis, the one area of Swift's Moor Park experience for which a good portion of documentary evidence survives. He collates and thoroughly evaluates the more traditional biographical evidence that has been cited over the years and applies his findings to careful analyses of Swift's earliest poems and prose works. Included among these are portions of the celebrated Tale of a Tub, as they seem to work in a Moor Park context for Moor Park readers. The results are as unexpected as they are likely to prove controversial, with clear implications about the nature and workings of Swift's satiric method throughout his career. The Swift who emerges is equally unexpected—betraying hints of a fondness for mischief, a basic sense of pragmatism, and a disconcertingly original intelligence—yet for all that remains a remarkably elusive figure and perhaps, as Elias suggests, an unknowable one in the end. If Swift at Moor Park investigates Swift's personality and the genesis of his satiric art, it is equally concerned with methodology—with the testing and evaluating of evidence, with its ability to support valid generalization, with the relationship between biographical knowledge and literary criticism, and with the peculiar temptations and pitfalls that Swift, perhaps more than any other figure of his time, provides for those who set out to explain him. A close analysis of a crucial decade in Swift's life, this volume is essential for the scholar of this central figure in English literature.

Shane Herron demonstrates how eighteenth-century irony was used not only in derision but also to clarify and sharpen emotional investments.

An authoritative scholarly 2010 edition of Swift's satiric masterpiece, with full textual apparatus and annotation.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

Marprelate, Milton, Marvell, and Swift are among the best prose satirists in a remarkably rich literary era. Focusing on these key figures, ‘Betwixt Jest and Earnest’ examines the theory and practice of religious prose in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Recognizing the difficulties inherent in attempting to transform unimaginative animadversion into effective satire, it analyses the ways in which Marprelate’s tracts, Milton’s anti-prelatical satires, Marvell’s The Rehearsal Transpros’d, and Swift’s A Tale of a Tub variously resolve the decorum of religious satire. Although the study is not specifically an intellectual history or a rigid definition of religious attitudes towards jest, it does bring together basic symptoms of altering sensibilities in the period. Marprelate, Milton, Marvell, and Swift represent diverse religious dispositions, but they share a similar satiric vision. Each recognizes the central importance of manner, and all develop dramatic satire heavily dependent on character, an emphasis which often displaces the immediate issues contested, but never obscures the larger concerns the satirists pursue. Their preoccupations with the nature of tradition, their emphasis on the self, and their sensitivity to language reflect similar involvements in questions of certainty and absolutism. The virtues and abuses they find in such central questions are not unique to them or their time, but their emphases are, for they wrote in an age in which sensitive men could confront revolution and reaction with an assurance not easily attainable once that era had passed.