The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift

Description

The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift is a specially commissioned collection of essays. Arranged thematically across a range of topics, this volume will deepen and extend the enjoyment and understanding of Jonathan Swift for students and scholars. The thirteen essays explore crucial dimensions of Swift's life and works. As well as ensuring a broad coverage of Swift's writing - including early and later works as well as the better known and the lesser known - the Companion also offers a way into current critical and theoretical 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 politicised age. The Companion offers a lucid introduction to these and other issues, and raises new questions about Swift and his world. The volume features a detailed chronology and a guide to further reading.

Christopher Fox is Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. He is the author of Locke and the Scriblerians: Identity and Consciousness in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain.

'... is important not just for the information it gathers but for the balance it offers between the purely, or largely, literary readings and those that offer a broader perspective ...' Eighteenth-Century Ireland