San Antonio College Library

"Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) is an inexhaustibly intriguing figure in the literary and political history of England and Ireland. Best known as the author of Gulliver's Travels, he was an ordained clergyman whose enemies thought he did not believe in God. He became a legendary dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin whose ambition for church preferment in England was perpetually frustrated. For four short, intoxicating years he was the intimate of...

It is the aim of this biography to offer a new, comprehensive view of Swift and his writings. For years, biographies of the Dean were bedeviled by legends of his madness and by romantic mysteries surrounding his relationship. Post-war scholarship has swept all this away, and has provided a factual basis for a much clearer understanding of both his life and work. Dr. Nokes presents a portrait of Swift in his multifarious roles as satirist, politician,...

"Brothers of the Quill takes a familiar eighteenth-century theme - Grub Street, the trials and tribulations of professional writers in the early days of commercial literature - and brings a new perspective to it. It follows the early career of Oliver Goldsmith, who in 1756 arrived destitute in London - an Irish 'vagabond' -and within a few years rose out of Grub Street anonymity to become a celebrated author. It investigates Goldsmith's literary themes...

The purpose of this study is to put forward an interpretation of Swift's work based entirely on the writings themselves and on their relation to ideas, attitudes, and literary methods current in his own day. It arises from the belief that one cause of the frequent misunderstanding of the major satires is that they have been considered in isolation from the political tracts, the letters, the sermons, the sets of maxims, and even in isolation from one...