Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART I LITERARY PRODUCTION AND DISSEMINATION: CHANGING AUDIENCES AND EMERGING MEDIA
- PART II LITERARY GENRES: ADAPTATION AND REFORMATION
- 5 Restoration and early eighteenth-century drama
- 6 Dryden and the poetic career
- 7 Political, satirical, didactic and lyric poetry (I): from the Restoration to the death of Pope
- 8 Eighteenth-century women poets
- 9 Systems satire: Swift.com
- 10 Persistence, adaptations and transformations in pastoral and Georgic poetry
- 11 Political, satirical, didactic and lyric poetry (II): after Pope
- 12 Drama and theatre in the mid and later eighteenth century
- 13 Scottish poetry and regional literary expression
- PART III LITERATURE AND INTELLECTUAL LIFE: THE PRODUCTION AND TRANSMISSION OF CULTURE
- PART IV LITERATURE AND SOCIAL AND INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE
- PART V LITERARY GENRES: TRANSFORMATION AND NEW FORMS OF EXPRESSIVENESS
- PART VI CONCLUSION
- Chronology
- Bibliographies
- Index
- References
9 - Systems satire: Swift.com
from PART II - LITERARY GENRES: ADAPTATION AND REFORMATION
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART I LITERARY PRODUCTION AND DISSEMINATION: CHANGING AUDIENCES AND EMERGING MEDIA
- PART II LITERARY GENRES: ADAPTATION AND REFORMATION
- 5 Restoration and early eighteenth-century drama
- 6 Dryden and the poetic career
- 7 Political, satirical, didactic and lyric poetry (I): from the Restoration to the death of Pope
- 8 Eighteenth-century women poets
- 9 Systems satire: Swift.com
- 10 Persistence, adaptations and transformations in pastoral and Georgic poetry
- 11 Political, satirical, didactic and lyric poetry (II): after Pope
- 12 Drama and theatre in the mid and later eighteenth century
- 13 Scottish poetry and regional literary expression
- PART III LITERATURE AND INTELLECTUAL LIFE: THE PRODUCTION AND TRANSMISSION OF CULTURE
- PART IV LITERATURE AND SOCIAL AND INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE
- PART V LITERARY GENRES: TRANSFORMATION AND NEW FORMS OF EXPRESSIVENESS
- PART VI CONCLUSION
- Chronology
- Bibliographies
- Index
- References
Summary
Swift's satiric vision
It is one of those wonderful quirks of language and history that ‘Yahoo’ is now the name of an Internet search engine, whereas Jonathan Swift invented the word as the degenerate moniker for the most irredeemable creatures on earth ever to sling excrement. Swift approached the early eighteenth century as Luddites today approach the early twenty-first: the new is a source of deep anxiety. Not only did Swift resist experimental science, speculative philosophy, expanded credit-based trade economy, weapons technology and colonisation, but also modern ways of dispensing information – newspapers and journals, self-help literature, mass-culture entertainments, schemes for social improvement and memoir-based narratives. The more modern, progressive, immediate something was, the more Swift's satiric inner voice was suspiciously attuned to it and infuriated by it.
Swift's satire is abundant and various, but several themes and propositions dominate his work, some of which appear in his sermons, essays, and letters as well. One recurrent Swiftian notion holds that the human race is on a degenerative path. Things get worse for Swift; they do not get better: ‘But men degenerate every day, merely by the folly, the perverseness, the avarice, the tyranny, the pride, the treachery, or inhumanity of their own kind.’ Another notion holds that even bad things are made worse by a spirit of opposition that factionalises all institutions, ideas, loyalties. Swift writes to his friend and fellow satirist, Alexander Pope, on 10 January 1721, ‘the spirit of Faction hath so universally possessed the minds of men, that they are not at leisure to attend to any thing else’.
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- Information
- The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–1780 , pp. 235 - 258Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005