Jonathan Swift and the Millenium of Madness. The Information Age in Swift's ' A Tale of a Tub '.

CRAVEN, KENNETH

ISBN 10: 9004095241 / ISBN 13: 9789004095243

Published by Leiden-New York-Köln, E.J. Brill. 1992, 1992

About this Item

Original publisher's red cloth hardback, gilt tile spine and frontcover, pictorial dustjacket, large 8vo: frontispiece, xiv, 238pp., [ij], footnotes, bibliographical notes, list works cited, index. Very fine copy. Volume 30: Brill's Studies in Intellectual History.

Seller Inventory # 153059

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Jonathan Swift and the Millenium of Madness. The Information Age in Swift's ' A Tale of a Tub '.
• Publisher: Leiden-New York-Köln, E.J. Brill. 1992
• Publication Date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9004095241
• ISBN 13: 9789004095243
• Binding: Hardcover
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included

About this title

Synopsis

Casting aside critical shibboleths in place for centuries, Kenneth Craven's Jonathan Swift and the Millennium of Madness proposes a new view of intellectual history. This revisionary study documents Swift's intimate knowledge of seventeenth-century science from Bacon and the Invisible College at Oxford to the Newtonian synthesis within the context of Paracelsian medicine and the chemical-mechanical split. Craven shows that Swift joins the philosophies of a neoplatonic divine order, Epicurean atomism, the Reformation, and scientific millenarianism as permeating his time with millennial myths sure eventually to detonate the sense of composure of individuals and societies. In contradistinction, Swift elucidates links between the humors traditions in medicine and literature, saturnine melancholy and the dreaming god Kronos. He proposes the somber realism of the Kronos myth as providing awareness of the self-imposed restraints on ego needed to preclude the proliferation of modern information systems into trivialization of the human enterprise to meaninglessness.
This fresh and exhaustive examination of the Anglo-Irish writer's first masterpiece, A Tale of a Tub (1704) unlocks barriers to seeing the nature of Swift's complex integrity, passion, and literary achievements throughout a career studded with disappointments. Specifically, this study authoritatively reveals the identity of unnamed victims of Swift's satire as the deist John Toland and his republican hero, John Milton, for their advocacy of the Puritan Revolution and regicide; Toland's mentor John Locke and another Lockean disciple, Lord Shaftesbury, who confused happiness and self-interest with delusion and the public weal; and his tormentors in the Church of Ireland, Narcissus Marsh and Peter Browne.

About the Author

Kenneth Craven, Ph.D. in comparative literature (English and Russian), Columbia University, has served on the faculty of the City College of New York, practiced psychotherapy, and worked as management consultant for A.T. & T., IBM, and the Xerox Corporation. His landmark study for the National Science Foundation and the Modern Language Association defined the information cycle and prescribed the first doctoral programs in information and computer sciences.