Jonathan Swift

It is a poem highly characteristic of her manner: a moral tale featuring a personified quality, humorous, ironic, and written in octosyllabic couplets reminiscent of Swift or Prior . Prudence and Oeconomy are the daughters...

These poems succeed in making the Christian life of resignation and unselfishness into a series of heroic trials and combats. MA has the makings of a fine poet in the grand style; she evidently learned...

She explains that having waited four months for Swift to answer her marriage proposal—still in love with him, having rejected other suitors for his sake, admiring his power of raillery, forgiving his harshness to women...

The opening poem, Nothing New, situates the anxieties of authors in regard to critics in the tradition of anxieties of lovers: both are right to be anxious. The contents include an English translation of...

Along with the sentimental and misunderstanding-prone lovers and the ridiculous esprit circle (which might so easily be taken to represent the Bluestockings), The Witlings features a women's working environment: a milliner's shop where seamstresses make...

This book is often seen as a sequel, and it retails the same type of scandal as the New Atalantis, but without the supernatural mediating characters. It too purports to be translated: this time...

Fidelia defends herself against the suspicion of being a male in disguise: I feign my name, but not my sex. She keeps up the fantasy of her love for Swift , assuring...

She trod a fine line as to the expression of her own feelings, for if the courtship should not end in marriage, she would have compromised her reputation. She converts this restriction into a rhetorical...

One common element shared by DM 's writing in different genres (plays, fiction, non-fiction) is its targeted sensationalim and deliberate artistic excess. Another is its partisan political content. Swift , who approved her very generous...

She had rich material to draw from because her father, John Sinclair (1754-1835), was an unusually accomplished man who was very active in public life. Most notably, he conceived and undertook the publication of The...

Her editor Elizabeth Mavor , however, prints a late poem (which MC herself called jingling doggerel), written for a family magazine produced by some young nephews and nieces, which is anything but sapless in...

This essay includes elements of fiction and reportage. It both exemplifies and defends the colourful and linguistically distinct qualities of Irish lower-class speech, pointing out that for these speakers English is their second language. (This...

Against the trend of the times, RS aimed for historical interest rather than literary canonicity, compiling in his Specimens of the Later English Poets a collection of representative voices rather than a garland: The taste...

Each apology begins with a cliché like To tell you the truth—, or Don't mind me, dear—. One point of the joke (as in Swift 's Polite Conversation, 1738) is the flatness and inadequacy...

One interesting feature is the inclusion of nine poems by other authors: the canonical Prior , Swift , and Pope , the lesser-known men John Scott , William Broome , and Nathaniel Cotton , and...