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Irish Tracts and Poems Course DescriptionTake a glance at any textbook on literary history and you will find that Jonathan Swift is certainly best known for his famous prose satire Gulliver's Travels, which, on account of its complexity, keeps scholars at variance to this day. However, Swift was more than a brilliant satirist, he was also passionately interested in the concerns of his native country of Ireland. He wrote a wide range of pamphlets which immortalized him as the "Hibernian Patriot," the champion of Ireland's liberty against economic exploitation and political injustice at the hands of England. We shall therefore concentrate on a selection of his pamphlets and poems, classics like the Drapier's Letters and A Modest Proposal as well as curiosities like A Serious Poem upon William Wood and A Character, Panegyric, and Description of the Legion Club, in order to reconstruct Swift's views of Ireland, Ireland's troubled relations with England, the philosophy and politics of Mercantilism, and the role of pamphlets in eighteenth-century political discourse, a genre which was an important vehicle of propaganda and - as its great variety of forms and styles reveals - often of quite a high literary standard. Prerequisites:
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Jonathan Swift