Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)

ECTS allocation: 20
Teaching Faculty: Prof Ian Campbell Ross
Contact: 1 x 2 hours/week in Michaelmas term

This section of the course will examine a range of Swift's work in verse and prose, emphasizing literary, historical and cultural contexts appropriate to the reading of Irish writing in general and Irish writing of the long eighteenth century in particular.

Michaelmas Term: Weeks 1-6
(Please note that this course begins in Week 1 of the Michaelmas Semester. Students should read the set texts in advance of the seminar)

Week 1
1. Introduction (lecture and discussion)

Week 2
'Ode to the King' (1690)
The Story of the Injured Lady (1707)
'Verses said to be Written on the Union' (1707)
'A Description of the Morning' (1709)
'A Description of a City Shower' (1710)

Week 3
A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture (1720)
'An Excellent New Song on a Seditious Pamphlet' (1720)
The Drapier's Letters I and IV (1724-5)
'Horace, Book I, Ode xiv...paraphrased and inscribed to Ireland' (1724)

Week 4
Gulliver's Travels (1726)

Week 5
'A Short View of the Present State of Ireland' (1728)
A Modest Proposal (1729)
'An Excellent New Ballad; or, The True English Dean to be Hanged for a Rape' (1731)
‘Impromptu: “Behold a proof of Irish sense”' (c. 1742)

Week 6
'Stella's Birthday' (1727)
'A Beautiful Young Nymph going to Bed' (1731)
'Cassinus and Peter' (1734)
'Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift' (1731)

Primary Texts

Jonathan Swift, Swift: Major Works , ed. Angus Ross and David Woolley (rev. ed. 2008).
The most comprehensive single-volume anthology of Swift's work.

Jonathan Swift, The Complete Poems , ed. Pat Rogers (1983).
The best (modern-spelling) edition of the verse, with excellent notes.

Jonathan Swift, Swift's Irish Pamphlets , ed. Joseph McMinn (1991).
A useful compilation of some of Swift's most important writing on Ireland.

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels , ed. Claude Rawson. Oxford: O.U.P., 2005.
A reliable, reasonably-priced and easily accessible text.

Jonathan Swift and Thomas Sheridan, The Intelligencer , ed. James Woolley (1992).
An exemplary edition of the work, with invaluable notes.

Jonathan Swift, Correspondence , ed. Harold Williams, 5 vols. (1963-65)
A new edition by David Woolley is in progress (1999-)

Secondary Texts

 The following list is intended to help both students already familiar with Swift and those coming to him for the first time to orientate themselves towards the works on the course: be selective.

  i. Swift and Ireland

Beckett, J.C., 'Swift and the Anglo-Irish Tradition', in C.J.Rawson (ed.), The Character of Swift's Satire (1983).
Carpenter, Andrew, 'Swift', in Vol. 1 of Seamus Deane et als (eds.), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing , 3 vols. (1991)
______________ . ‘ A Tale of a Tub as an Irish text', Swift Studies , 20 (2005), 30-40
Connolly, S.J., 'Swift and Protestant Ireland: Images and Reality', in Aileen Douglas, Patrick Kelly and Ian Campbell Ross (eds.), Locating Swift (1998), pp. 28-46
Douglas, Aileen, Patrick Kelly, and Ian Campbell Ross, 'Introduction: Locating Swift', in Aileen Douglas, Patrick Kelly, and Ian Campbell Ross (eds.), Locating Swift (1998), pp. 9-27
Downie, J.A., Jonathan Swift: Political Writer ( 1984)
Ehrenpreis, Irvin, Swift: The Man, His Works and the Age , 3 vols. (1962-83)
Fabricant, Carole, Swift's Landscape (1982; repr. 1995)
____________________ ‘Swift the Irishman', in Christopher Fox, The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift (2003), 48-72
Fauske, Christopher J., Jonathan Swift and the Church of Ireland (2002)
Ferguson, O.W., Jonathan Swift and Ireland (1962)
Fox, Christopher and Brenda Tooley, Walking Naboth's Vineyard: New Studies of Swift (1995)
Kelly, Ann Cline, 'The Birth of "Swift"', in Richard H Rodino and Hermann J Real (eds.), Reading Swift (1993), 13-23
Kelly, James, 'Jonathan Swift and the Irish Economy in the 1720s', in Eighteenth-Century Ireland , 6 (1990), 7-36
Kelly, Patrick, ‘Swift on money and economics', in Christopher Fox, The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift (2003), 128-45
Mahony, Robert, Jonathan Swift: The Irish Identity (1995)
Landa, Louis A., Swift and the Church of Ireland (1954)
Mahony, Robert, Jonathan Swift: The Irish Identity (1995)
McMinn, Joseph, Jonathan Swift: A Literary Life (1991)
Nokes, David, Jonathan Swift: A Hypocrite Reversed (1985)
Ross, Ian Campbell, 'The Scriblerians and Swift in Ireland', in Richard H. Rodino and Hermann J. Real (eds.), Reading Swift (1993), 81-89
________________ ‘Swift and Dublin', Reading Gulliver (2008), pp. 1-27
Said, Edward, The World, The Text and the Critic (1984)
Yeats, W.B., 'Preface' to The Words upon the Window-pane (1934).

ii. Swift criticism

Barnett, Louise K, Swift's Poetic Worlds (1981)
_____________ Jonathan Swift in the Company of Women (2007)
Boyle, Frank, Swift as Nemesis: Modernity and Its Satirist (2000)
Craven, Kenneth, Jonathan Swift and the Millennium of Madness (1992)
Donoghue, Denis (ed), Jonathan Swift: A Critical Anthology (1971)
Doody, Margaret A., ‘Swift among the Women', The Yearbook of English Studies , 18 (1988)
Douglas, Aileen, ‘”In a glass, darkly”: Swift, Gulliver and the Human Shape', in Daniel Carey and François Boulaire (eds), Les voyages de Gulliver (2002), pp. 125-38.
Douglas, Aileen and Ian Campbell Ross, ‘Singularity and the Syllabus: the Teaching of Swift in Trinity College, Dublin', in Aileen Douglas, Patrick Kelly and Ian Campbell Ross (eds), Locating Swift (1998), pp. 9-27.
Fischer, John Irwin, On Swift's Poetry (1978)
Fischer, John Irwin and Donald C. Jell, Jr, with David M. Vieth (eds), Contemporary Studies in Swift's Poetry (1981)
Fischer, John Irwin, Hermann Real, and James Woolley (eds), Swift and His Contexts (1989)
Fox, Christopher, The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift (2003)
Karian, Stephen. Jonathan Swift in Print and Manuscript (2010)
Palmieri, Frank (ed), Critical Essays on Jonathan Swift (1993)
Phiddian, Robert, Swift's Parody (1995)
Pollak, Ellen, The Poetics of Sexual Myth: Gender and Ideology in the Verse of Swift and Pope (1985)
Probyn, Clive T., (ed), The Art of Jonathan Swift (1978)
Rawson. Claude, Gulliver and the Gentle Reader: Studies in Swift and Our Time (1973; repr. 1991)
________________ The Character of Swift's Satire: A Revised Focus (1983)
________________ God, Gulliver, and Genocide : Barbarism and the European Imagination, 1492-1945 (2001)
Real, Hermann, and Heinz J. Vienken (eds), Proceedings of the First Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift (1985)
Reilly, Patrick, Jonathan Swift: The Brave Desponder (1982)
Ross, Ian Campbell, ‘“A very knowing American”: the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega and Swift's A Modest Proposal ', Modern Language Quarterly , 68:4 (2007), 493-516
Said, Edward, The World, the Text, and the Critic (1984)
Schakel, Peter, J., The Poetry of Jonathan Swift (1978)
Wood, Nigel, Swift (1986)

iii. Eighteenth-Century Ireland: politics, religion, literature, society

Beckett, J.C., The Anglo-Irish Tradition (1976).
Canny, Nicholas, Kingdom and Colony: Ireland in the Atlantic World 1560- 1800 (1988).
______________, 'Identity Formation in Ireland: The Emergence of the Anglo-Irish', in Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden (eds.), Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (1987).
Carpenter, Andrew, ‘Poetry in English 1690-1800: from the Williamite Wars to the Act of Union', in Margaret Kelleher and Philip O'Leary (eds), The Cambridge History of Irish Literature , 2 vols (2006), i, pp. 282-319.
Casey, Christine, Dublin (2005)
Connolly, S.J . , Religion, Law, and Power: The Making of Protestant Ireland (1992).
__________ (ed), The Oxford Companion to Irish History (1998; 2 nd ed. 2002)
__________ (ed), Political Ideas in Eighteenth-Century Ireland (2000)
Craig, Maurice, Dublin 1660-1800 (1969).
Cullen, L.M., The Economic History of Ireland since 1600 (1972; 2nd ed. 1987).
Deane, Seamus, with Andrew Carpenter and Jonathan Williams, The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing , vol. 1 (Derry, 1991).
Dickson, David, New Foundations: Ireland 1660-1800 (1987; rev. 2000).
Gillespie, Raymond and Andrew Hadfield, The Oxford History of the Irish Book: Volume III The Irish Book in English 1550-1800 (2006)
Johnston, Edith M., Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (1974).
McBride, Ian. Eighteenth Century Ireland (2009)
McGuinness, Philip, Alan Harrison and Richard Keane, John Toland's Christianity Not Mysterious (1997)
Moody T.W. and W.E. Vaughan , A New History of Ireland IV: Eighteenth- Century Ireland 1691- 1800 (1986).
Pagden, Anthony and Nicholas Canny, Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (1987).
Pollard, M., Dublin's Trade in Books 1550-1800 (1989).
Ross, Ian Campbell, ‘Prose in English 1690-1800: from the Williamite Wars to the Act of Union', in Margaret Kelleher and Philip O'Leary (eds), The Cambridge History of Irish Literature , 2 vols (2006), i, pp. 232-81.

The interdisciplinary journal Eighteenth-Century Ireland/Iris an dá chultúr (1986-) also contains many articles of interest and relevance, as does Swift Studies (1986-).

For recent and current work on eighteenth-century literature in Ireland, see the website of the Eighteenth-Century Literature Research Network in Ireland: eclrni.com