Jonathan Swift and Popular Culture Myth, Media and the Man: Myth, Media, and the Man - Hardcover

Kelly, A.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312239599 ISBN 13: 9780312239596

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002

Synopsis

Ann Kelly's provocative book breaks the mold of Swift studies. Twentieth century Swift scholars have tended to assess Jonathan Swift as a pillar of the eighteenth-century 'republic of letter', a conservative, even reactionary voice upholding classical values against the welling tide of popularization in literature. Kelly looks at Swift instead as a practical exponent of the popular and impressario of the literary image. She argues that Swift turned his back on the elite to write for a popular audience, and that he annexed scandals to his fictionalized print alter ego, creating a continual demand for works by or about this self-mythologized figure. A fascinating look at print culture, the commodification of the author, and the history of popular culture, this book should provoke lots of discussion.

About this title

About the Author:

ANN CLINE KELLY has been writing on Jonathan Swift for thirty years. She is Professor of English at Howard University, and is author of Swift and the English Language (U. Penn). She also appeared in a recent documentary on Gulliver's Travels broadcast by The Discovery Channel/The Learning Channel as part of their Great Books Series.

Review:

'Kelly's literate and enjoyable style makes her work accessible and interesting to undergraduates and specialists alike.' - Choice

'Kelly's is a provocative but a very convincing thesis, the more attractive for its freedom from academic jargon. She has clearly profited from later twentieth-century critical theory, but is very effective in the use she makes of older insights from psychological and folklore commentators; and both her command of the demotic ephemera of Swift's day and of the bye-ways of anglophone popular culture in the two and a half centuries since his death are exemplary of Swift scholarship at its finest, of a sort we have rarely seen for decades.' - Robert Mahoney, Irish Studies Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0312239599
• ISBN 13: 9780312239596
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 255