Jonathan Swift
The Reluctant Rebel
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- £17.99
Publisher Description
A rich and riveting portrait of the man behind Gulliver’s Travels, by a “vivid, ardent, and engaging” (New York Times Book Review) author.
One of Europe’s most important literary figures, Jonathan Swift was also an inspired humorist, a beloved companion, and a conscientious Anglican minister—as well as a hoaxer and a teller of tales. His anger against abuses of power would produce the most famous satires of the English language: Gulliver’s Travels as well as the Drapier Papers and the unparalleled Modest Proposal, in which he imagined the poor of Ireland farming their infants for the tables of wealthy colonists.
John Stubbs’s biography captures the dirt and beauty of a world that Swift both scorned and sought to amend. It follows Swift through his many battles, for and against authority, and in his many contradictions, as a priest who sought to uphold the dogma of his church; as a man who was quite prepared to defy convention, not least in his unshakable attachment to an unmarried woman, his “Stella”; and as a writer whose vision showed that no single creed holds all the answers.
Impeccably researched and beautifully told, in Jonathan Swift Stubbs has found the perfect subject for this masterfully told biography of a reluctant rebel—a voice of withering disenchantment unrivaled in English.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this engaging, though at times excessively detailed, biography, Stubbs (Donne: The Reformed Soul) succeeds in portraying famed author Jonathan Swift (1667 1745) with all his contradictions. Swift, best known for Gulliver's Travels, was an irreverent social critic and a moralist, the dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, and "a socialite in the parlor." Born in Dublin to displaced English parents, he would always insist he was English and, as Stubbs notes, saw no contradiction between urging the native Irish to Anglicize their language and customs and opposing English tyranny over Ireland. One of his day's most prominent political writers, Swift supported the Anglican establishment yet felt an affinity with the poor, mentally ill, and oppressed, and his attitudes toward women could be, as Stubbs shows, both enlightened and repressive. Stubbs covers the English Civil War, which displaced Swift's parents; the Glorious Revolution, which led Swift to move to England; and the ascension of George I, which sent him back to Ireland. He also touches on the animosity between Catholics and Protestants, the printing and bookselling industry, Swift's literary peers, and much more. Stubbs's descriptions are vivid, and his literary analyses exacting and thought-provoking, but one wishes he had been more selective in contextual detail. Nevertheless, Stubbs excels at showing how Swift became "the most notorious writer of his day."
