Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) was a posthumous child born in Dublin, Ireland, of English parents and educated at Trinity College, Dublin. Swift also benefited from associating with a man distinguished bothin public affairs and in literature. It is said that he secretly married Esther Johnson (Stella).

His growing literary reputation took him to London. 1710 he left the Whigs and joined Tory party. He became a major Tory journalist pamphleteer and satirist. In 1720 he became a great supporter of Irish interests against English exploitation. The death of Stella in 1728 deprived him of the tenderest attachment of his life.

Swift wrote The battle of books (1697) to defend Temple’s position of favoring the ancients, as against the modern authors in the controversy of the ancients and moderns. It is a mock-heroic prose account of the civil war that broke out among the books of Royal Library, but the amusing narrative serves chiefly as a setting for incident of spiders and the bee. The spider, representing the moderns, claim to be superior to the bee by the merit of originality whereas the bee is a mere plunder of flowers.

Swift regarded A tale of a Tub (1696) as his greatest work. The main section of it presents the allegory of three brothers who inherit from their father three suits of cloth (the Christian faith) and a will (the Scriptures) directing their use of the clothes. Swift ridicules the Dissenters by calling them Aeolists whose inspiration is wind. He also accuses the Anglican Church of having deviated from the pristine truth of Christianity.

In 1713, he was made the dean of St. Patrick’s cathedral in Dublin, and with the fall of Tory ministry, he left London and spent the rest of his life in Dublin. He championed the cause of the Irish. In 1724, with his Drapier’s letters which forced the government in London to withdraw its proposals for the new Irish coinage, he became the hero of the native population.

During his stay in London, swift kept a diary of intimate chat for the benefit of the Stella, which was posted fortnightly to Ireland. Three letters preserved and published as journal to Stella reveal his gentleness and humanity as well as his affections for Stella, to whom he confides his opinion of people around him and his authorship of anonymous political pamphlets.

In 1726, swift returned to London, where Gulliver’s Travels was published anonymously. Its original conception seems to have been part of the projects of the Scriblerus Club. It is divided into four books or voyages, but the third one was written last of all.

Gulliver’s Travels

Swift tries to make the reader believe that a man called Lemuel Gulliver lived and experienced what happened to him in those four voyages. He actually gives a biography of his fictional character to make the reader believe that Gulliver is a reality.

Lemuel Gulliver studied at Cambridge and became apprenticed to an eminent surgeon of London. After taking several voyages as ship surgeon he married and settled in London. His practicing medicine on land was a failure. Therefore, he accepted an offer to be a surgeon on ship called Antelope.

First Voyage (to Liliput)

Driven by a violent storm to the northwest of Van Diemen Land in South Sea, the ship is driven on a rock, and only Gulliver escapes. Almost exhausted by swimming, he reaches shore and falls into sound sleep. When he wakes up, he finds himself strongly fastened to the ground, unable to move arms, legs, or head. He finds that he has been captured by human creatures not six inches high. He is transported to the capital, housed in an old temple and taught language of Liliput. Soon he is granted his liberty, with allowance of food sufficient for 1728 Lilliputians.

He is secretly informed of the court decision to put out his eyes and starve him to death. He leaves Liliput for neighboring Kingdom of Blefuscus. Finally, he leaves Blefuscus ina boat. He is picked up by an English captain who brings him home.

Second Voyage (to Brobdingnag)

Gulliver’s insatiable desire to see foreign countries makes him sign up within two month for a voyage on the merchant-ship Adventure, which is driven hundreds of leagues to east of Molucca Island. They go to a strange island for fresh water, but a huge creature forces them to flee, leaving Gulliver behind. Hiding himself in a field, he is captured by a farmer who is as tall as a church steeple, and who takes Gulliver for an insect. The farmer’s daughter teaches Gulliver the language of Brobdingang. Exhausted by being forced to perform in public, Gulliver is glad to be sold to the Queen and to be treated as a pet in court. The king laughs at the wars and religious and political debates in Europe and explains his view of the English people: “I cannot but conclude your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.” Having gone with king and queen to a town on the east coast, he is left in the care of pageboy, who puts his box down on the shore. The box is carried off by a great bird and is finally dropped into the sea. Gulliver is thus rescued by an English ship that takes him home.

Winning his wife’s consent, Gulliver soon sets forth again. Their ship is seized by pirates, and he is set adrift a in a canoe in the sea east of Japan. He comes to an island called Balnibarbi, governed by another island called Laputa, which floats in their air above it.

The people of Laputa are versed in theoretical mathematics without making any practical use of it. The king keeps the people below in submission by his ability to shut off th sun and the rain. Lagado, the capital of Balnibarbi, is controlled by the Academy of Projectors, where a man has been working for eight years to extract sunbeams from cucumbers. A scientist is trying to reduce human ordure to its original food, an architect has proposed to build houses from the roof down, and a professor is seeking to compose books by spinning blocks of wood on which words are written.

Gulliver returns to England and accepts an offer to be the captain of a ship. The crew mutinies and he is set down on a strange island ruled by horses, the Houyhnhms that have a degenerated race called Yahoos as their field-servants. The Yahoos are disgusting and they look so much like human being that Gulliver is taken as one of them. These intelligent horses are rational, simple, and incapable of telling lies. They have no words on such matters like government, law, lust, punishment, war, or envy. They conceive of no disease except the infirmities of age. Gulliver is treated with kindness by those horses that found him, but Houyhnhnms fear that he may become the leader of a Yahoo revolt. Therefore, he is permitted to build a large canoe and sail away.

Gulliver’s Travels had, for almost two centuries, been misinterpreted as a pessimistic treatment of humanity and Swift as a misanthrope, but modern scholarship has discovered the nature of its satire as well as Swift’s artistic power and good will. Swift’s pessimism, if any, is related to the Christian conception of the evil nature of man, described by many other contemporary clergymen who emphasize man’s weakness, vanity, unreasonable desires, and corruption. In Gulliver’s Travels, Swift expresses savage indignation at follies, vices, and stupidities of man, and he wrote the book to promote awareness of man’s tragic insufficiency, hoping that self-knowledge might lead to right action.

2. 20the Cent. novels can be divided into 3 subperiods:

• High Modernism through 1920s: celebrating personal and textual inwardness, complexity, and difficulty.
• 1930s, 40s, 50s: Reaction against Modernism; A return to social realism, moralism, and assorted documentary.
• After the collapse of the British empire (esp. 1960s): The fictional claims of various realisms; the enduring legacy of modernism.

3. At the end of the cent.: Postmodernism – Postcolonialism >> Panoramic mix of voices ind styles.

4. 1912 – 1930: The Heroic Age of the Modern Novel.

• The disappearance of the general background of belief which united the novelists with their public. >> Building up new values.
• A new view of time: as a continuous flow in the conscious of the individual.
• The new notions of the nature of consciousness.

5. The stream of consciousness technique was developed in 1920s.

6. The search for communion and inescapable isolation of Leopold Bloom in Ulyssis is symbolic of human condition as seen by modern novelists.

7. The dilemma of human condition is never solved in these novels.

8. Lawrence’s novels themes: Human relationships.

9. The documentary novelists presented the changing social scene. >> Woolfe called these writers materialists.

10. The short story benefited from the techniques of exploration in depth.

2. Dictated by Ezra Pound: “Direct treatment of the ‘thing’, whether subjective or objective, on the avoidance of all words that did not contribute to the presentation and on a freer metrical movement than a strict adherence to the sequence of a movement” could allow.

3. Sir Herbert Gierson’s 1912 ed. of Donne’s poems both reflected and encouraged enthusiasm for 17th Cent. Metaphysical poetry. >> More intellectual complexity.

4. French symbolist poetry was appreciated for its imagistic precision and complexity.

5. Union of thought and passion.

6. *** Wilfred Owen: “I suppose I am doing in poetry what the advanced composers do in music.”

7. Neutral tone, after Ww II, gave way to a direct and human voice. >> New Apocalypse Poets >> they owed their imagistic audacity and rhetorical violence to French Surrealism.

8. 1950s: “The Movement”: Aimed for a neutral tone and a purity of diction. (Philip Larkin)

9. Late 1950s and 1960s: Poems that suggest the violence and irrationality of modern history.

10. Since 1980s: New voices came into Eng. Lit. tradition.

3. Thomas Hardy marked the end of the Victorian period and the dawn of the new age in his poem “the Darkling Thrush”, originally titled “By The Century’s Deathbed”. It opens with the description of winter, and exemplifies the pessimism of imaginative writing in the last decade of the 19th and first decade of the 20th Cent.

4. Stoicism characterizes the literature written in the transitional period between the Victorian era and modernism.

5. Sir James Frazer’s “Golden Bough” and other works of anthropology, were altering basic conceptions of culture, religion, and myth.

6. Eliot describes in “Four Quarters” his quest for the “still point of all the turning world”.

7. 1882: “The Married Woman’s Property Act”

8. 1899-1902: Anglo-Bower war (the beginning of Britain’s political history)

9. the 1930s: the Red Decad.