Browsing by Subject "Jonathan Swift"

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Imperial authorship and eighteenth-century transatlantic literary production
(2011-08) Hardy, Molly O'Hagan, 1977-; Cohen, Matt, 1970-; Moore, Lisa L. (Lisa Lynne); Baker, Samuel; Bertelsen, Lance; Harlow, Barbara
My project examines eighteenth-century struggles over literary property and its part in England’s control over its colonies. Debates over literary property set in the context of the larger colonial struggles over ownership help us to understand the relationship between authority and authorship: in the colonies, booksellers and authors worked together to make authority and authorship local, to separate it from England, English constructions of authorship, and the book trade system in London. The figures I analyze––Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, and Mathew Carey––brought new models of print capitalism to the colonies, dispersing an understanding of copyright that was an assertion of local affiliations. In the case of Ireland, these affiliations manifested themselves in a nationalist movement, and in Scotland, in an assertion of equality under the union of Great Britain. In the newly formed United States, the affiliations were among those still struggling for legal recognition after the American Revolution. Using book history in the service of literary analysis, my study is the first devoted to reading the way that liminal figures such as George Faulkner, Alexander Donaldson, Absalom Jones, and Richard Allen have influenced the work of these largely canonical authors, and thus local politics, through their literary production practices.
Jonathan Swift, Sir William Temple and the international balance of power
(2013-05) Gertken, Matthew Charles; Rumrich, John Peter, 1954-; Hedrick, Elizabeth A.
This dissertation investigates the balance of power theory of international relations in the works of Jonathan Swift and his mentor Sir William Temple. Both Temple and Swift are known to have championed balance-of-power foreign policy, yet no sustained study of the subject exists. To begin, I argue that Temple used balance as a metaphor for division or separation. His policy of preserving the “Balance of Christendom” translates to sowing division among European states, and for the same reason he rejects balance of power at home. Proceeding to Swift, while commentators have long known that he advocated the classical theory of constitutional balance, they have neglected his engagement with international balance. Swift assimilates Temple’s positions into a universal theory based on classical authors; he sees balance of power as an element in the broader quarrel of ancients and moderns. The ancient view posits an independent agent who operates within the constraints of a system; the modern, by contrast, either exaggerates agency to the point of divine-right absolutism or minimizes it to the extent that only an impersonal, clockwork-like system remains. In both cases, the moderns pursue material power at each other’s expense, neglecting the intangible benefits of due separation. This theory has important ramifications for Swift’s international writings. For years scholars have emphasized Swift’s conspiracy theorizing in the Conduct of the Allies, but I argue that he discredits the Whig war cry of “Balance of Europe,” which sought military power (the balance of forces) as an end in itself, and reasserts balance as a policy of slicing Europe into as many separate kingdoms as possible. Ultimately, however, Swift’s most lasting contribution appears in Gulliver’s Travels. Here he depicts maritime power as the quintessential means by which moderns pursue absolute power, and intimates a political “Balance of Earth” as a satirical correction. This study, the first to focus on the international dimension of Swift’s political theory, offers a corrective to literary studies that favor domestic politics and yields insights into the evolution of balance-of-power theory and the intersection of culture and foreign policy at the dawn of the British empire.
Mechanical operations of the spirit : the Protestant object in Swift and Defoe
(2010-12) Neimann, Paul Grafton; Betelsen, Lance; Arens, Katherine, 1953-; Rumrich, John; Bender, John; Hedrick, Elizabeth
This study revises a dominant narrative of the eighteenth-century, in which a secular modernity emerges in opposition to religious belief. It argues that a major challenge for writers such as Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe, and for English subjects generally, was to grasp the object world--including the modern technological object--in terms of its spiritual potential. I identify disputes around the liturgy and common prayer as a source of a folk psychology concerning mental habits conditioned by everyday interactions with devotional and cultural objects. Swift and Defoe therefore confront even paradigmatically modern forms (from trade items to scientific techniques) as a spiritual ecology, a network of new possibilities for practical piety and familiar forms of mental-spiritual illness. Texts like A Tale of a tub (1704) and Robinson Crusoe (1719) renew Reformation ideals for the laity by evaluating technologies for governing a nation of souls. Swift and Defoe's Protestantism thus appears as an active guide to understanding emotions and new experience rather than a static body of doctrine. Current historiography neglects the early modern sense that sectarian objects and rituals not only discipline religious subjects, but also provoke ambivalence and anxiety: Swift's Tale diagnoses Catholic knavery and Puritan hypocrisy as neurotic attempts to extract pleasure from immiserating styles of material praxis. Crusoe, addressed to more radical believers in spaces of trade, sees competent spiritual, scientific and commercial practice on the same plane, as techniques for overcoming fetishistic desires. Swift's orthodoxy of enforced moderation and Defoe's oddly worldly piety represent likeminded formulae for psychic reform, and not--as often alleged--conflicts between sincere belief and political or commercial interests. Gulliver's travels (1726) and A Journal of the plague year (1722) also link mind and governance through different visions of Protestant polity. Swift sees alienation from the national church--figured by a Crusoe or Gulliver--as refusal of common sense and problem solving. Defoe points to religious schism, exemplified by dissenters' exclusion from state church statistics, as a moral and medical failure: the city risks creating selfish citizens who also may overlook data needed to combat the plague.
“Th’ estate which wits inherit after death” : immortality in Pope’s Temple of Fame and the “Battle of the Books”
(2015-05) Hemstreet, Jennifer, 1983-; Bertelsen, Lance; Garrison, James D
In this report, I examine Alexander Pope’s Temple of Fame in terms of its rhetorical structure as well as its “place” in the post-classical canon. I offer three critical assessments: 1) that Pope’s poem frames itself as a response to Swift’s “Battle of the Books” within the historical moment of a Humanist split; 2) that both Swift’s text and Pope’s represent literary immortality as a central problem in the Ancient-Modern controversy; and 3) that Pope’s poem consciously locates itself within a classical and Humanist tradition of literary self-eternization. I suggest that for Pope, the significance of the Ancients was not merely their primacy or objective excellence, but also their status as a foundation on which the very possibility of literary immortality was predicated. Pope’s Temple, understood in the context of the “battle,” thus invites a reevaluation of the role of classical eternizing rhetoric both in shaping Pope’s own career and, more broadly, in defining the principles of Humanism.