Contemporaries were mesmerized by the outrageous wit of Jonathan
Swift (1667-1745), a writer still widely regarded as the greatest
satirist of all time. Soon after Swift's death, his friends and
enemies raced to publish the definitive account of the Dean of St
Patrick's. Now, Routledge brings these major works together for the
first time in a new, three-volume, facsimile collection,
supplemented with a full introduction, bibliographies, and other
textual apparatus. The collection's editor avers that these highly
influential biographies of one of the leading literary figures of
his generation remain incompletely understood. The persistence of a
number of myths can be traced back to these studies of Swift,
including his own pseudo-biographical fragment on his early life.
It is crucial that many of these biographies were written or
commissioned by friends and allies of Swift and that some were
written-or were informed by-his enemies. The collection's editor
makes clear that the lives of Swift have a strongly interdependent
relationship and, by bringing these studies together in one
easy-to-use reference resource, scholars will more readily be able
to trace the perambulations of specific anecdotes and biographical
readings, and better understand how Johnson's defining picture of
Swift emerged. Volume I of the collection opens with an extended
introductory account of the history of biographies and biographical
criticism of Swift in the eighteenth century and beyond. The volume
reproduces Lord Orrery's notorious 'Judas-biography', the Remarks
on the Life and Writings of Dr Jonathan Swift (1752), and a
little-known book-length response, A Letter from a Gentleman in the
Country, to his Son in the College of Dublin (1752-3), and,
finally, the entry on Swift in Cibber's multivolume collection The
Lives of the Poets (1753). The second volume includes the largely
overlooked Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Jonathan Swift, DD
(1752), a freely adapted plagiarism of Orrery's Remarks, and
Patrick Delany's well-known Observations upon Lord Orrery's
'Remarks on the Life and Writings of Dr Jonathan Swift' (1754).
This volume also contains the biographical essay from John
Hawkesworth's Works of Jonathan Swift, DD, Dean of St Patrick's,
Dublin (1755), and the undervalued Life of Jonathan Swift by the
lesser-known biographer W. H. Dilworth. (Although it is largely
unexamined by modern scholars, his influence on contemporary Swift
studies merits renewed attention.) The final volume in the
collection, meanwhile, comprises Deane Swift's seminal Essay upon
the Life, Writings, and Character of Dr Jonathan Swift (1755),
which includes Jonathan Swift's own fragmentary 'Family of Swift'
(c. 1727), and Patrick Delany's cantankerous response, A Letter to
Dean Swift, Esq (1755). The collection ends with full textual
apparatus, including contemporary reviews of, and responses to, the
competing lives of Jonathan Swift. The Lives of Jonathan Swift
provides a full and fascinating picture of eighteenth-century
attitudes to one of the great figures of the age. It will be
welcomed by Swift scholars and students, as well as those more
broadly interested in the art and function of literary biography.
---- ---- Routledge facsimile collections make key archival source
material readily available to scholars, researchers, and students
of literary studies, as well as those working in allied and related
fields. Selected and introduced by expert editors, the gathered
materials are reproduced in facsimile, giving users a strong sense
of immediacy to the texts and permitting citation to the original
pagination.
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