Jonathan Swift

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...

The Elixir of Life opens with the waking vision of a man and woman in their summer prime, he looking like Apollo, she looking like an angel with just a touch of the siren or...

EH's fictional Swift is widely unlike the original, especially in prose style.

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Her poem to Lord Carteret concerns a work probably by Swift. The publication addressed to Lady Carteret (actually consisting of one poem to her and one to her daughter) shows a strong sense of...

MR's own twenty poems include prefatory verses as editor, written for the occasion. She prints work by the late Henrietta O'Neill (the well-known Ode to the Poppy), Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire (St...

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...