Opposite Of The Eulogistic

Jonathan Swift

In this concise critical survey, Professor Donoghue looks at Swift's whole output, and expresses a fresh sense of his literary character. In particular, he questions the widespread view that Swift is to be understood in terms of irony, persona or mask. He points out, for instance, that Swift's irony is not continuous, and that his sense of form is not ours. We should not see him as producing elaborate artistic structures, but as meeting particular needs which forced themselves upon him. We need also to identify the 'gestures' through which Swift revealed his characteristic mental attitudes, and behind them to sense his general life-stance; to understand his devices - such as the choice and change of perspective; his deeper pre-occupations - such as the relationship between the body, the mind and the soul; his attitude to and use of language; his conception of the nature of humanity; the characteristics of his verse.

The Progressive Dictionary of the English Language

Pleasures of Benthamism

This book offers a fresh look at the often-censured but imperfectly understood traditions of Utilitarianism and political economy in their bearing for Victorian literature and culture. It treats writings by Jeremy Bentham, Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, James and John Stuart Mill, Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Rabindranath Tagore. It sets texts in historical context, examines style as well as ideas, and aims to widen awareness of commonalities across seemingly divided expressions of the age. A work of 'new economic criticism,' it also treats Utilitarianism, close kin to political economy but even more poorly understood and poorly regarded. No other literary study addresses Bentham so fully. The book further contributes to study of Victorian literature-and-liberalism and Victorian liberalism-and-imperialism. It challenges a high-cultural perspective and a perspective of ideology-critique that derive from F. R. Leavis and Michel Foucault and inform the prevailing idea of Victorian literature: as contender against the repressive mentality of Mr. Gradgrind, Dickens's caricature of a Smith-Benthamite; against the 'carceral' social discipline of Bentham's Panopticon; and against the 'dismal science.' But 'utility' has the happier meaning of pleasure. This study presents a capitalist, liberal age pursuing utility in commerce, industry, and socioeconomic/political reforms; favourable to freedom; and 'leveling' as regards gender and class. What about empire? a question not generally so squarely confronted in works on Victorian literature-and-economics and Victorian literature-and-liberalism. Shown here is the surprising extent to which liberalism develops as liberalism through 'liberal imperialism'.