Jonathan Swift : The Irish Identity

During the eighteenth century, Jonathan Swift was internationally acclaimed for 'Gulliver's Travels' and other brilliant satires in verse and prose. In his native Ireland, however, he was more fervently admired as a patriot. Advocating economic self-sufficiency for Ireland and resistance to the high-handedness of the British government, Swift represented a stirring challenge to British rule. Although his reputation as an Irish patriot declined after his death, the twentieth century came to recognise him as a founding father of Irish nationalism. This book traces Swift's fluctuating reception in Ireland through the centuries, finding in Swift's ambivalence about his homeland - which he could not love even as he defended its cause - echoes and anticipations of the ambiguities that have marked the development of Irish identity at large. Mahony looks at Swift's posthumous reputation in literary culture and examines his unusual place in Irish political rhetoric. He shows that Swift's patriotic reputation suffered in the later eighteenth century through its seeming irrelevance to shifting political circumstances. In the early nineteenth century Irish Protestants made Swift a symbol of their own patriotism within the British union, but he was ignored, or dismissed as a bigot, by most Catholic writers. In the 1840s the Young Ireland movement sought to alter the perception by emphasizing Swift's anti-British rhetoric while establishing his Protestant pedigree. And although charges of hypocrisy and English cultural orientation continued as late as the 1930s, the construction of Swift as a patriot survives, two hundred and fifty years after his death. '... fascinating reading for anyone interested either in Swift or in the course of Irish history, as illuminated by the fluctuations in Swift's reputation over the centuries.' Conor Cruise O'Brien Robert Mahony is Director of the Center for Irish Studies and Associate Professor of English at the Catholic University of America, Washington D.C..