Book Reviews

Beautiful Theories: The Spectacle of Discourse in Contemporary Criticism (Elizabeth Bruss) (Reviewed by Susan Rubin Suleiman, Harvard University)Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction (Robert C. Holub) (Reviewed by Michael Eckert, University of Florida)Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales (V. A. Kolve) (Reviewed by Elizabeth S. Sklar, Wayne State University)The Character of Swift\u27s Satire: A Revised Focus (Claude Rawson) (Reviewed by Michael Seidel, Columbia University)Swift\u27s Narrative Satires: Author and Authority (Everett Zimmerman) (Reviewed by Michael Seidel, Columbia University)William Godwin (Peter H. Marshall) (Reviewed by John P. Clark, Loyola University - New Orleans)Introspection and Contemporary Poetry (Alan Williamson) (Reviewed by Charles Molesworth, Queens College and Graduate Center, CUNY)Robert Bly: An Introduction to the Poetry (Howard Nelson) (Reviewed by Charles Molesworth, Queens College and Graduate Center, CUNY)Victorian and Modern Poetics (Carol T. Christ) (Reviewed by Hugh Witemeyer, The University of New Mexico

Satire of economic and social problems in Jonathan Swift’s a modest proposal

Satire is one of the literary genres that is used to mock or ridicule a person or thing. Satire also tends to represent human folly in order to look ridiculous and uses irony to expose some aspects of human condition. This research aims to explain Swift’s satire through his A Modest Proposal which focuses on economic and social problems. Thus, to achieve those mentioned goals, the researcher then proposed two problems: 1) How do Swift's ridiculous ways make economic and social problems becoming a satire in his A Modest Proposal? 2) What do Swift's ridiculous ways mean in making economic and social problems become a satire in his A Modest Proposal? In analyzing those problems, the researcher uses some theories by applying the concept of irony to know satire itself which is also supported by historical context and Marxist theories to know economic and social problems. The result of this research shows that Swift uses irony to support his satiric method. Swift’s suggestions to solve some problems look ridiculous in which the parents exploited their children to fulfill their needs. Economic and social problems are then determined by historical context at the time in which English people colonized Ireland with the rule which much damaged Irish people. This case plays important in the construction of Swift’s satire

Misogynous Economies: The Business of Literature in Eighteenth-Century Britain

The eighteenth century saw the birth of the concept of literature as business: literature critiqued and promoted capitalism, and books themselves became highly marketable canonical objects. During this period, misogynous representations of women often served to advance capitalist desires and to redirect feelings of antagonism toward the emerging capitalist order. Misogynous Economies proposes that oppression of women may not have been the primary goal of these misogynistic depictions. Using psychoanalytic concepts developed by Julia Kristeva, Mandell argues that passionate feelings about the alienating socioeconomic changes brought on by capitalism were displaced onto representations that inspired hatred of women and disgust with the female body. Such displacements also played a role in canon formation. The accepted literary canon resulted not simply from choices made by eighteenth-century critics but also, as Mandell argues, from editorial and production practices designed to stimulate readers\u27 desires to identify with male poets. Mandell considers a range of authors, from Dryden and Pope to Anna Letitia Barbauld, throughout the eighteenth century. She also reconsiders Augustan satire, offering a radically new view that its misogyny is an attempt to resist the commodification of literature. Mandell shows how misogyny was put to use in public discourse by a culture confronting modernization and resisting alienation. Laura C. Mandell is assistant professor of English at Miami University of Ohio.https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_british_isles/1063/thumbnail.jp

Language at Work in Jonathan Swift

PhD ThesisLanguage is not a simple bridge from thought to meaning: it has a constitutive function of its own, and its effects should be considered along with the ideas it conveys. The language of Jonathan Swift illustrates this point exactly, because of its mode of operation. In the Swiffian text language is always at work; involved in processes of questioning and reshaping its contents, and our reading of them. Swift's writing enacts, as much as it states, and the reader must be attentive to this process, if the full impact of the texts is to be measured. My project in this thesis is to analyse how language operates in the major works, and the outcome of its activity. In each chapter, I consider how relevant seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ideas of language impact on, and are affected by, Swift's language; as well as his amenability to current ideas in theories of language. First, seventeenth-century attempts to reform and purge language are measured against Swift's handful of explicit statements on the subject; and although there are points of convergence, I conclude that it is more productive to study Swift's less conventional experiments with language than to assemble a fitful philosophy from a few comments. The remaining chapters engage in this project. I assess A Tale of a Tub in relation to ideas of 'the book'—an opportunity to consider the complex interactions between authors, texts, and readers from the vantage point of an ideal of certainty and totality. The poetry is measured against the Augustan separation of 'sound' from 'sense', which founders when confronted with Swift's contemplation of the poetic object through excessive concentration on the body and its products. And Gulliver 's Travels represents an engagement with issues of fictionality and context, and how these affect the dispensation of meaning. Throughout these discussions, my intention is to establish that Swift's writing survives, and its future is assured, because of its interactive, interrogatory, self reflective nature

"No more existence than the inhabitants of Utopia" : Utopian satire in Gulliver's travels

This study provides the first book-length examination of Gulliver's Travels as a utopian work. Swift relies on the genre of the utopia for the structure of each of the book's four voyages and as a means to further his satire on human nature, English society, and utopianism itself. The first two chapters introduce to the reader the methods and vocabulary of Utopian Studies, the critical approach utilized in this dissertation. They lay the foundation for the later examination of Swift's complex manipulation of the genre by analyzing various definitions of utopia, by examining the connection between satire and the utopian tradition established by Thomas More, and by detailing aspects of the structure and themes of utopias that served as probable sources for Gulliver's Travels

Satirizing habits in Victorian fiction: novelistic satire, 1830s-1890s

"This dissertation argues for a significant presence of satire within Victorian novels from the 1830s to the 1890s - the very decades in which many influential critics, from the early twentieth century to the present day, discern a marked, general decline in the practice of satire. As early as the eighteenth century, writers valued amiable humour over wit and satire; continuing this trend, countless Victorian writers and critics attempted (in David Worcester's words) to ""pus[h] satire into the dunce's comer"" (32). Nevertheless, regardless of their theoretic disavowal of satire, many novelists embraced, in their narrative practice, its mild Horatian, philosophical Menippean, and even stringent Juvenalian possibilities. Charlotte Bronte's words to Elizabeth Gaskell may be applied to many Victorian writers: ""'Satirical you are - however; I believe a little more so than you think""' (Letters 3: 4 7). Current studies of satire in the Victorian novel tend to restrict themselves to individual analyses of substantially satiric novels such as Martin Chuzzlewit or The Way of All Flesh; more generic assessments are deferred. In terms of broader engagements, Frank Palmeri' s view that satire is a form of writing that disappears ""underground or into eclipse"" (""Thackeray"" 770) in the mid-Victorian period, only to emerge in the late decades of the period, is representative. In this dissertation, however, I demonstrate a distinctly Victorian satiric focus on society as the source of moral ills by identifying habit as a dominant, encyclopaedic subject of novelistic satire. The belief that human character is substantially a social creation is exemplified by George Henry Lewes's observation: ""To understand the Human Mind we must study it under its normal conditions, and these are social conditions"" (PLMJ 128). As well, inspired by Athena Vrettos's enterprising work on the prevalence of Victorian debates concerning habit and its relevance to psychological realism in terms of Dickens's Dombey and Son, I trace the relations of culturally embedded discourses on habit to the period's novelistic satire. Satirists' preoccupation with habit is strikingly illuminated by Mikhail Bakhtin's social-formalist assessment of the novel's steadfast roots in ancient serio-comical literature and Menippean satire - a dialogic form that defamiliarizes habit. Cultural systems - ""all the habitual matrices [sosedstva] of things and ideas"" - are exposed in ""the menippea"" through voracious parody of literary and non-literary genres, and through the ""creation of ... unexpected connections"" (Dialogic 169). Victorian novelists, I argue, continued the traditions of satire (as an evolving mode or genre) through an engagement with omnipresent theories of habit. Although authoritative nineteenth-century discourses (both of natural science and of moral/social science) implicate habit in the forces of determinism, contradictory theories inveterately identify habit as a locus of moral hope (through habits of sympathy, self-control, free will, and free thought). I examine in detail the confluence of satire and this dual discourse of habit through close readings of canonical Victorian novels. The novels I discuss, from Cranford (1851-53) and Silas Marner (1861) to The Way of All Flesh (written between 1873 and 1884, published 1903) and New Grub Street (1891), demonstrate either Horatian optimism or Juvenalian cynicism with regard to habit as a source for good or ill. It is a trajectory encapsulated by Edward Bulwer-Lytton's transition from optimism and faith in habits of sympathy in Pelham ( 1828) to his cynicism concerning the assimi1ating powers of habit in The Coming Race (1871). Importantly, Dickens's novels of the 1850s and 60s, which target habit in ""lines of blood and fire"" (30) (to borrow James Hannay' s epithet for Juvena1ian satire), foreground the theoretical issues be1eaguering satire's relations with the novel. The satura of Bleak House (1852-53), Hard Times (1854), and Our Mutual Friend (1864-65) is characterized by unrestrained metaphor that targets all forms of institutional (social) and individual (psychological) bad habits. Finally, I investigate misogynist theorizations of both satire and habit, by analyzing the satiric machinery of Charlotte Bronte's Shirley (1849) and George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-72). With satiric irreverence, both novels pose a question that is crucial to historic and Victorian theories concerning female mental inferiority: ""'[D]o you seriously think all wisdom in the world is lodged in male skulls?''' (Bronte, S 328). Despite the era's ambivalence to satire, which I explore at length, Victorian novelists were profoundly engaged with its literary and social possibilities. Dissociating and dissenting from the ""habitual matrices"" of their culture, and engaging with complex moral discourses affirming the ""familiar fact, the power of habit"" (Mill, Utilitarianism 10: 238), novelists wrote philosophically probing and culturally critical Menippean, Horatian, and Juvenalian satire.