Jonathan Swift – Life and Works English Literature YouTube Lecture Handouts

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Title: Jonathan Swift – Life and Works

Jonathan Swift: Life And Works, Pseudonyms|English Literature

  • 1667 - 1745
  • Irish author, clergy man and satirist
  • Trinity college in Dublin
  • Secretary to Sir William Temple, man of letters
  • Esther Johson – Stella
  • After Temple՚s death started editing and publishing
  • Doctor of Divinity
  • Started with Whig and then moved to Tory
  • 1713 – Dean of St. Patrick
  • Scriblerus Literary Club
  • 1st political pamphlet – A Discourse on the Contests and Dissentions in Athens and Rome

Pseudonyms

  • Lemuel Gulliver,
  • Isaac Bickerstaff,
  • M. B Drapier
  • Anonymous
  • Encyclopædia Britannica as the foremost prose satirist in the English language
  • Horatian and Juvenalian styles
  • Dean Swift - sobriquet
  • Swiftian

Important Works

  • A Tale of Tub
  • Drapiers Letters
  • A Modest proposal
  • Gulliver Travels
  • The Battle of the Books
  • An Argument against Abolishing Christianity
  • John Ruskin named him as one of the three people in history who were the most influential for him.
  • George Orwell named him as one of the writers he most admired, despite disagreeing with him on almost every moral and political issue.
  • Modernist poet Edith Sitwell wrote a fictional biography of Swift, titled I Live Under a Black Sunand published in 1937.
  • Jake Arnott features him in his 2017 novel The Fatal Tree.

MCQs

Who is the patron of Jonathan Swift?

A. George Orwell

B. Alexander Pope

C. Chaucer

D. Sir William Temple

Manishika