Swift's Satires on Modernism: Battlegrounds of Reading and Writing Book

More than three centuries since their first publication Jonathan Swift's A Tale of a Tub 'The Battle of the Books ' 'The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit ' and An Argument against Abolishing Christianity remain striking prescient and still-relevant challenges to Modern commitments to inwardness reflection and spiritualism. In this lively and engaging study - grounded in the intellectual and historical currents of Swift's time with an eye on the implications for the present day - G. Douglas Atkins brings forty-plus years of scholarly and critical experience to bear on some of the greatest satires ever written. The study reveals new contexts for understanding Swift's satires including post-Reformation reading practices and the development of the modern personal essay. This book revisits from fresh perspectives the late seventeenth-century version of the perennial warfare between Ancients and Moderns then often instanced as 'the battle of the books.'Read More