NONFICTION

Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World

by Leo Damrosch
Yale Univ. 2013. 568p. illus. notes. bibliog. index. ISBN 9780300164992. $35. LIT
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Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), Irish novelist, essayist, satirist, cleric, and poet, was a man of mystery and great intellectual heft, as Damrosch (Ernest Bernbaum Research Professor of Literature, Harvard; Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius) demonstrates. He asserts that while Swift's best-known work, Gulliver's Travels, is universally recognized, it is often mistaken for a fairy tale when in fact it masks a revolutionary political view of Swift's native Ireland. Damrosch seeks here to round out the version of the author presented in Irvin Ehrenpreis's Swift: The Man, His Works, and the Age, asking questions about his private affairs: Did Swift have a secret marriage to his housekeeper's daughter? Damrosch raises issues about Swift's life and clarifies fact from fiction, providing insight into the writer and the time and place he inhabited.
VERDICT Irish history buffs and literati alike will need to read this work.
Reviewed by Elizabeth Heffington, Lipscomb Univ. Lib., TN , Dec 01, 2013
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