ENGLISH

Swift's Politics: A Study in Disaffection

By Ian Higgins

Book information

Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Year
1994
ISBN
0521418143, 9780521418140, 0521025680, 9780521025683, 9780511519048
LCC
PR3728.P6 H54 1994
Open Library ID
OL1400792M
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
6 MB (6026642 bytes)
Series
Cambridge Studies in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Thought
Pages
248\247
Time added
2011-04-28 18:43:47

Description

Modern scholarship has represented Jonathan Swift as both an Old Whig and a non-Jacobite Tory. Ian Higgins' contextual reassessment of Swift's political writing and recorded opinion considers the interpretative problems they present. It explores the consonance of Swift's political writing with militant Jacobite Tory writing on affairs of Church and State, and demonstrates Swift's dissimilarity from the Old Whig writers with whom modern criticism has misleadingly identified him. Swift's writings of the 1690s, during the last four years of Queen Anne's reign, and after the Hanoverian succession are shown to contain Jacobitical political implications when examined in their context in the 'paper wars' of the period. Higgins concentrates on the partisan meanings of the great satires A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's Travels, and represents Swift (as he was read by his contemporaries) as a disaffected High Church Anglican extremist with Jacobite inclinations.

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