Kirsten Juhas Boeken

On the occasion of Hermann J. Real's seventy-fifth birthday, this collection honours a scholar whose contagious curiosity has been dedicated to the study of Jonathan Swift's life and works for the past four decades. The contributions cover multiple aspects of the Dean's writings as well as a number of eighteenth-century contexts. They not only celebrate the Director of the Ehrenpreis Centre at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität, Münster, the Editor of the annual Swift Studies, and the convener of six international Münster symposia on the Dean of St Patrick's, but they also pay homage to the mentor, colleague, and friend. At the same time, they reflect the enduring vitality of Swift studies, which it has been one of Hermann J. Real's greatest academic achievements to promote.

Assembling thirty-five lectures delivered at the Sixth Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift in June 2011, this new volume of Reading Swift testifies to an extraordinary spectrum of research interests in the Dean of St Patrick’s, Dublin, and his works. As in the most successful earlier volumes, the essays have been grouped in eight sections: biographical problems; bibliographical and textual studies; A Tale of a Tub; historical and religious as well as economic and political issues; poetry; Swift and Ireland; Gulliver’s Travels; and Reception and Adaptation. Clearly, the élan vital, which has been such a distinctive feature of Swift scholarship in the past thirty years, is continuing unabated.

In their verse, many British women composing poetry in the long eighteenth century wrote about and reflected on the very process of writing itself. In doing so, they often imitated and adapted specific poetic topoi, motifs, and generic patterns established by their male predecessors and peers including, among others, Homer, Ovid, and Juvenal, Dryden, Pope, and Swift. In exploring the phallic connotations of ‘pen and ink’, in invoking the assistance of a personal muse, in writing sharp and effective ‘self-satires’, and in identifying themselves with Philomela, the mythological persona of the nightingale, women like Anne Finch, Mary Chudleigh, Sarah Dixon, Mary Leapor, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and Charlotte Smith fashioned and authorized themselves as (female) poets.