San Antonio College Library

This book offers an accessible single-volume introduction to a wider range of Swift's writing than is usually covered in such treatments of him. Primarily a work of biographically-inflected literary criticism, it draws on insights furnished by feminist and postcolonial literary theories when those are relevant. Commencing with an account of the domestic and foreign contexts in which Swift's life was rooted, the book provides a chronological account...

Explores crucial dimensions of Swift's life and works. In addition to ensuring a broad coverage of Swift's writing-including early and later works as well as the better known-this book also offers a way into current critical and theorectical issues surrounding the author. Special emphasis is placed on Swift's vexed relationship with the land of his birth, Ireland; and on his place as a political writer in a highly politicized age.

"In this concise critical survey, Professor Donoghue looks at Swift's whole output, and expresses a fresh sense of his literary character. In particular, he questions the widespread view that Swift is to be understood in terms of irony, persona or mask. He points out, for instance, that Swift's irony is not continuous, and that his sense of form is not ours. We should not see him as producing elaborate artistic structures, but as meeting particular...

Paradoxically Swift is one of the most misunderstood writers in English literature. His own contemporaries often failed to grasp his meaning.