Jonathan Swift and the Eighteenth-Century Book

Paddy Bullard · James McLaverty

Jul 2013 · Cambridge University Press

About this eBook

Jonathan Swift lived through a period of turbulence and innovation in the evolution of the book. His publications, perhaps more than those of any other single author, illustrate the range of developments that transformed print culture during the early Enlightenment. Swift was a prolific author and a frequent visitor at the printing house, and he wrote as critic and satirist about the nature of text. The shifting moods of irony, complicity and indignation that characterise his dealings with the book trade add a layer of complexity to the bibliographic record of his published works. The essays collected here offer the first comprehensive, integrated survey of that record. They shed new light on the politics of the eighteenth-century book trade, on Swift's innovations as a maker of books, on the habits and opinions revealed by his commentary on printed texts and on the re-shaping of the Swiftian book after his death.

About the author

Paddy Bullard is lecturer in eighteenth-century studies at the University of Kent, Canterbury. From January 2005 to December 2009 he was an AHRC Research Fellow attached to the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift and Rank Junior Research Fellow at St Catherine's College, Oxford. He is the author of Edmund Burke and the Art of Rhetoric (Cambridge, 2011).

James McLaverty is Emeritus Professor of Textual Criticism at Keele University. With David Womersley he was one of the principal investigators on the AHRC-funded 'Textual Edition and Archive of the Works of Jonathan Swift' (2005–10) and served as one of the general editors of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift from 2005 to 2009. He is the author of Pope, Print, and Meaning (2001).