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

Jonathan Swift and Popular Culture Myth, Media and the Man In contrast to many 20th-century Swift studies, this text looks at Jonathan Swift as a practical exponent of the popular and impressario of the literary image, and thus provides a view of print culture, the commodification of the author and the history of popular culture.

About this title

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

Synopsis:

Twentieth-century Swift scholars have tended to assess Jonathan Swift as a pillar of the 18th century "republic of letter", a conservative, even reactionary, voice upholding classical values against the welling tide of popularization in literature. Anne 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. This provocative book takes a look at print culture, the commodification of the author and the history of popular culture.

About this edition

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