Swift's Angers

Jonathan Swift's angers were all too real, though Swift was temperamentally equivocal about their display. Even in his most brilliant satire, A Tale of a Tub, the aggressive vitality of the narrative is designed, for all the intensity of its sting, never to lose its cool. Yet Swift's angers are partly self-implicating, since his own temperament was close to the things he attacked, and behind his angers are deep self-divisions. Though he regarded himself as 'English' and despised the Irish 'natives' over whom the English ruled, Swift became the hero of an Irish independence he would not have desired. In this magisterial account, Claude Rawson, widely considered the leading Swift scholar of our time, brings together recent work, as well as classic earlier discussions extensively revised, offering fresh insights into Swift's bleak view of human nature, his brilliant wit, and the indignations and self-divisions of his writings and political activism.

'Swift's Angers is deeply learned and provocative, wide-ranging in its references and rich in its readings. Rawson's Swift is a conflicted man … that many of us feel we already know, but one who has perhaps never before been so fully and poignantly rendered.' Ashley Marshall, Modern Philology, '[Claude Rawson is] the most consistently brilliant Swiftian of our age. He also brings enviable depth of reading and a range of reference to his analysis of Swift and … the book contains so much lasting value that it should be read by every self-respecting Sciblerian,' Andrew Carpenter, The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats

Claude Rawson is Maynard Mack Professor of English at Yale University. He is a General Editor for The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift and author of God, Gulliver and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination 1492–1945 (2001). He is most recently the editor of Essential Writings of Jonathan Swift: A Norton Critical Edition (co-edited with Ian Higgins, 2010); Great Shakespeareans: Volume 1, Dryden Pope, Johnson, Malone (2010); Literature and Politics in the Age of Swift: English and Irish Perspectives (Cambridge, 2010) and The Cambridge Companion to English Poets (Cambridge, 2011).