Sometime toward the middle of 1689, a twenty­one-year-old Irishman named Jonathan Swift entered the employ of Sir William Temple, an essayist and retired diplomat. Swift spent most of the next decade working as secretary at Moor Park, Temple's country house in Surrey. When he left in 1699, he was already a satirist of exceptional power. Drawing upon considerable new documentary evidence, Swift at Moor Park represents the most exhaustive study yet published about this formative period in Swift's literary career and challenges traditional assumptions and conclusions concerning those years. A. C. Elias begins with the work Swift actually did as Temple's secretary-amanuensis, the one area of Swift's Moor Park experience for which a good portion of documentary evidence survives. He collates and thoroughly evaluates the more traditional biographical evidence that has been cited over the years and applies his findings to careful analyses of Swift's earliest poems and prose works. Included among these are portions of the celebrated Tale of a Tub, as they seem to work in a Moor Park context for Moor Park readers. The results are as unexpected as they are likely to prove controversial, with clear implications about the nature and workings of Swift's satiric method throughout his career. The Swift who emerges is equally unexpected—betraying hints of a fondness for mischief, a basic sense of pragmatism, and a disconcertingly original intelligence—yet for all that remains a remarkably elusive figure and perhaps, as Elias suggests, an unknowable one in the end. If Swift at Moor Park investigates Swift's personality and the genesis of his satiric art, it is equally concerned with methodology—with the testing and evaluating of evidence, with its ability to support valid generalization, with the relationship between biographical knowledge and literary criticism, and with the peculiar temptations and pitfalls that Swift, perhaps more than any other figure of his time, provides for those who set out to explain him. A close analysis of a crucial decade in Swift's life, this volume is essential for the scholar of this central figure in English literature.

A contextual reassessment of Swift's political writing concentrating on A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's Travels.

Poets are makers, etymologically speaking. In practice, they are also thieves. Over a long career, from the early 1690s to the late 1730s, Jonathan Swift thrived on a creative tension between original poetry-making and the filching of familiar material from the poetic archive. The most extensive study of Swift's verse to appear in more than thirty years, Reading Swift's Poetry offers detailed readings of dozens of major poems, as well as neglected and recently recovered pieces. This book reaffirms Swift's prominence in competing literary traditions as diverse as the pastoral and the political, the metaphysical and the satirical, and demonstrates the persistence of unlikely literary tropes across his multifaceted career. Daniel Cook also considers the audacious ways in which Swift engages with Juvenal's satires, Horace's epistles, Milton's epics, Cowley's odes, and an astonishing array of other canonical and forgotten writers.

Jonathan Swift: Irish Blow-in covers the arc of the first half of Jonathan Swift’s life, offering fresh details of the contentment and exuberance of his childhood, of the support he received from his grandmother, of his striking affection for Esther Johnson from the time she was ten years old (his pet name for her in her twenties was “saucebox”), of his precocious entry into English politics with his Contests and Dissensions pamphlet, of his brilliant and much misunderstood Tale of a Tub, and of his naive determination to do well both as a vicar of the small parish of Laracor in Ireland and as a writer for the Tory administration trying to pull England out of debt by ending the war England was engaged in with France. I do not share with past biographers the sense that Swift had a deprived childhood. I do not share the suspicion that most of Swift’s enmities were politically motivated. I do not feel critical of him because he was often fastidious with his money. I do not think he was insincere about his religious faith. His pride, his sexual interests, his often shocking or uninhibited language, his instinct for revenge – emphasized by many previous biographers – were all fundamental elements of his being, but elements that he either used for rhetorical effect, or that he tried to keep in check, and that he felt that religion helped him to keep in check. Swift had as firm a conviction as did Freud that we are born with wayward tendencies; unlike Freud, though, he saw both religion and civil society as necessary and helpful checks on those wayward tendencies, and he (frequently, but certainly not always) acknowledged that he shared those tendencies with the rest of us. This biography, in two books, Jonathan Swift: Irish Blow-in and Jonathan Swift: Our Dean, will differ from most literary biographies in that it does not aim to show how Swift’s life illuminates his writings, but rather how and why Swift wrote in order to live the life he wanted to live. I have liberally quoted Swift’s own words in this biography because his inventive expression of ideas, both in his public works and in his private letters, was what has made him a unique and compelling figure in the history of literature. I hope in these two books to come closer than past biographies to capturing how it felt to Swift himself to live his life. Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.