The Golden Age of Satire: Criminals, Castaways, Couplets, and Kings

Catalog description

This course will explore the literary culture of the British Isles during the lifetime of the great Anglo-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift. In his use of humor, shock, whimsy, and quicksilver irony to convey moral outrage and personal pique, Swift has influenced every major satirist who came after him—from Mark Twain to John Oliver. Swift also lived through remarkable times. Between his birth in 1667 and his death in 1745, Britain grew from a war-torn cultural backwater to a military and colonial powerhouse with a stable, if corrupt, political system, several of the world’s great cities, and a sense of national identity that has remained largely consistent to this day. At the same time, the marketplace of literature and ideas in Britain grew increasingly diverse and fractious, as popular fiction appealed to newly literate readers and as authors from the social and colonial margins—including Ireland, a colony within the British Isles—began to make itself heard in print. Swift exemplified many of these developments in his life and work, at once mocking and immortalizing the crime-ridden squalor of London; attacking the English exploitation of Ireland, even as he formed part of the Anglican establishment in Dublin; and honing a form of ironic invective that enlightened, amused, and offended readers of all backgrounds and orientations. This course will cover each of Swift’s major works, from Gulliver’s Travels—both a classic of science fiction and a devastatingly effective satire—to his outrageous scatological poetry and his scathing writings on Ireland, including the notorious Modest Proposal, as well as introducing students to a host of other distinctive voices from this raucous period in English letters. We will, for example, become acquainted with the undisputed master of the heroic couplet, Swift’s friend Alexander Pope, who made satirical poetry of undying power and…