A01=Warren Montag
anthology
Author_Warren Montag
book club
book gifts
book lover
book lover gifts
book lovers
book lovers gifts
british history
capitalism
Category=DSBC
Category=DSBD
Category=JPA
classic
critical theory
culture
economics
england
enlightenment
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
essays
french
gifts for book lovers
gifts for readers
gifts for readers book lovers
ideas
library
literary criticism
literary gifts
literature
literature book
marxism
nerd gifts
philosophy
political philosophy
political science
political theory
renaissance
school
socialism
society
sociology
world history
Product details
- ISBN 9781859840009
- Weight: 311g
- Dimensions: 152 x 236mm
- Publication Date: 17 Sep 1994
- Publisher: Verso Books
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
No major figure of the English Augustan period has generated stronger and more contradictory views than Jonathan Swift. Scourge of the Whig ascendancy in his own day, vilified by the Victorians, celebrated by Yeats, he has in recent years become a significant bone of contention for prominent figures on the left like E.P. Thompson and Perry Anderson.
In this highly original and subtle new study, Warren Montag situates Swift in relation to the ideological and political currents of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries-in particular to what Montag perspicaciously identifies as the long crisis of the British state. Swift's perspective, he argues, was determined less by his personality or psychology than by his position as an Anglican cleric. The church, an instrument of the Tudor and Stuart absolutist state, lapsed into institutional and ideological crisis after the Stuart's fall. In Montag's view, Swift's writings were a defense of this increasingly indefensible institution. Swift employed satire because only in the negative representations of this literary form could the now effectively 'unthinkable' doctrines of the Church be made to appear.
Opening with a historical survey of the crisis of English absolutism and the Anglican Church, Montag then gives a definitive account of the specific conflicts in philosophy against which Swift's Anglican orthodoxy was aligned. Detailed examinations of Swift's two prose masterpieces, A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's Travels, follow.
Historically and philosophically informed, The Unthinkable Swift contributes not only to our understanding of a seminal figure in English literary history but also to the study of historical ideologies, in particular the once dominant religious tradition at the dawn of the first modern capitalist state.
In this highly original and subtle new study, Warren Montag situates Swift in relation to the ideological and political currents of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries-in particular to what Montag perspicaciously identifies as the long crisis of the British state. Swift's perspective, he argues, was determined less by his personality or psychology than by his position as an Anglican cleric. The church, an instrument of the Tudor and Stuart absolutist state, lapsed into institutional and ideological crisis after the Stuart's fall. In Montag's view, Swift's writings were a defense of this increasingly indefensible institution. Swift employed satire because only in the negative representations of this literary form could the now effectively 'unthinkable' doctrines of the Church be made to appear.
Opening with a historical survey of the crisis of English absolutism and the Anglican Church, Montag then gives a definitive account of the specific conflicts in philosophy against which Swift's Anglican orthodoxy was aligned. Detailed examinations of Swift's two prose masterpieces, A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's Travels, follow.
Historically and philosophically informed, The Unthinkable Swift contributes not only to our understanding of a seminal figure in English literary history but also to the study of historical ideologies, in particular the once dominant religious tradition at the dawn of the first modern capitalist state.
Warren Montag is Associate Professor of English at Occidental College, Los Angeles. He is the author of Bodies, Masses, Power: Spinoza and his Contemporaries and the Unthinkable Swift.
