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This article reads A Modest Proposal from the darker side of the westernised/anglicised Enlightenment. Firstly, it critically engages with the proclivity within the Anglocentric academy to celebrate English language literary figures associated with \"The Enlightenment\" in Ireland without a questioning of their role in the colonial project and in shaping its discourses of racism and sexism. Secondly, it focuses on how, from an Irish decolonial perspective, Jonathan Swift can be understood as a manager of the colonial racial/patriarchal matrix of power. Thirdly, it argues that the satire written by Jonathan Swift should be understood as an Anglocentric geo-cultural category and may be understood as westernised/anglicised Enlightenment satire. Finally, A Modest Proposal is analysed in terms of the exceptionality principle of irony, Swift's project of improvement and salvation of the colonised, and modernity/coloniality's rhetorical promise yet inability to solve the problems it produces. Este artículo propone una lectura de A Modest Proposal desde la perspectiva más oscura de una Ilustración occidentalizada y anglicista. En primer lugar, aborda desde un prisma crítico la proclividad de la academia anglocéntrica a celebrar figuras literarias en lengua inglesa asociadas con “la Ilustración” en Irlanda sin cuestionar su papel en el proyecto colonial y en la configuración de discursos raciales y sexistas. En segundo lugar, el artículo se centra en demostrar cómo, desde una perspectiva decolonial irlandesa, Jonathan Swift puede entenderse como un gestor de una matriz de poder colonial racial/patriarcal. En tercer lugar, el ensayo propone que la sátira escrita por Jonathan Swift debe abordarse como una categoría geocultural anglocéntrica y que puede entenderse como una sátira ilustrada occidentalizada/anglicanizada. Por último, se analiza A Modest Proposal en términos del principio de excepcionalidad de la ironía, el proyecto swiftiano de mejora y salvación de los colonizados, y la promesa retórica de la modernidad/colonialidad, aunque incapaz de resolver los problemas que produce.

This article reads A Modest Proposal from the darker side of the westernised/anglicised Enlightenment. Firstly, it critically engages with the proclivity within the Anglocentric academy to celebrate English language literary figures associated with “The Enlightenment” in Ireland without a questioning of their role in the colonial project and in shaping its discourses of racism and sexism. Secondly, it focuses on how, from an Irish decolonial perspective, Jonathan Swift can be understood as a manager of the colonial racial/patriarchal matrix of power. Thirdly, it argues that the satire written by Jonathan Swift should be understood as an Anglocentric geo-cultural category and may be understood as westernised/anglicised Enlightenment satire. Finally, A Modest Proposal is analysed in terms of the exceptionality principle of irony, Swift’s project of improvement and salvation of the colonised, and modernity/coloniality’s rhetorical promise yet inability to solve the problems it produces.

In 1997, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist J. M. Coetzee, invited to Princeton University to lecture on the moral status of animals, read a work of fiction about an eminent novelist, Elizabeth Costello, invited to lecture on the moral status of animals at an American college. Coetzee's lectures were published in 1999 asThe Lives of Animals, and reappeared in 2003 as part of his novelElizabeth Costello; and both lectures and novel have attracted the critical attention of a number of influential philosophers--including Peter Singer, Cora Diamond, Stanley Cavell, and John McDowell. InThe Wounded Animal, Stephen Mulhall closely examines Coetzee's writings about Costello, and the ways in which philosophers have responded to them, focusing in particular on their powerful presentation of both literature and philosophy as seeking, and failing, to represent reality--in part because of reality's resistance to such projects of understanding, but also because of philosophy's unwillingness to learn from literature how best to acknowledge that resistance. In so doing, Mulhall is led to consider the relations among reason, language, and the imagination, as well as more specific ethical issues concerning the moral status of animals, the meaning of mortality, the nature of evil, and the demands of religion. The ancient quarrel between philosophy and literature here displays undiminished vigor and renewed significance.

What fueled the Victorian passion for hair-jewelry and memorial rings? When would an everyday object metamorphose from commodity to precious relic? InPortable Property, John Plotz examines the new role played by portable objects in persuading Victorian Britons that they could travel abroad with religious sentiments, family ties, and national identity intact. In an empire defined as much by the circulation of capital as by force of arms, the challenge of preserving Englishness while living overseas became a central Victorian preoccupation, creating a pressing need for objects that could readily travel abroad as personifications of Britishness. At the same time a radically new relationship between cash value and sentimental associations arose in certain resonant mementoes--in teacups, rings, sprigs of heather, and handkerchiefs, but most of all in books. Portable Propertyexamines how culture-bearing objects came to stand for distant people and places, creating or preserving a sense of self and community despite geographic dislocation. Victorian novels--because they themselves came to be understood as the quintessential portable property--tell the story of this change most clearly. Plotz analyzes a wide range of works, paying particular attention to George Eliot'sDaniel Deronda, Anthony Trollope'sEustace Diamonds, and R. D. Blackmore'sLorna Doone. He also discusses Thomas Hardy and William Morris's vehement attack on the very notion of cultural portability. The result is a richer understanding of the role of objects in British culture at home and abroad during the Age of Empire. Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.

Race is at the centre of Russell Banks's grand scale novel Cloudsplitter (1998) which traces John Brown' struggle to abolish slavery in the years before the American Civil War. While Brown's (and Banks's) sympathy with Negro slaves is prevalent, the treatment of other social and ethnic groups, such as Native Americans and the Irish immigrants offers insight into the racial and cultural complexity of the United States. The essay identifies the three instances in which members of the Irish immigrant community in the aftermath of the Great Famine that drove them across the Atlantic play a role in this work, including: an extremely young prostitute, a \"sad lot\" of miners dwelling in shanties, and a gang of \"Irish laddies\" in Boston who beat up the narrator. It is suggested that these beings could be reminiscent of Jonathan Swift's depiction of the Irish in A Modest Proposal, and the Struldbrugs and Yahoos in Gulliver's Travels, in their circumstances, characterization, and actions. Key Words. Cloudsplitter, Russell Banks, Irish immigration, race, class, nineteenth century America, Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal, Gulliver's Travels. La magistral novela de Russell Banks Cloudsplitter (1998) pivota sobre el tema racial al trazar la lucha de John Brown por la abolicion de la esclavitud en los anos previos a la Guerra Civil norteamericana. Mientras que la simpatia de Brown (y de Banks) por los esclavos negros es incuestionable, el tratamiento de otros grupos sociales y etnicos deja entrever la complejidad racial y cultural de las Estados Unidos. El ensayo traza las tres instancias en las que aparecen miembros de la comunidad de inmigrantes irlandeses en las postrimerias de la Gran Hambruna que los empujo a cruzar el Atlantico. Estas instancias incluyen: una jovencisima prostituta, un \"triste hatajo\" de mineros que malviven en un poblado de chabolas, y una banda de \"chavales irlandeses\" en Boston que le proporcionan una somera paliza al narrador. En lo que atane a sus circunstancias, caracterizacion y acciones, se sugiere la posibilidad de que estas figuras contengan resonancias de las descripciones que hiciera Jonathan Swift de los irlandeses en Una modesta proposicion, y de los Struldbrugs y Yahoos en los Viajes de Gulliver. Palabras clave. Cloudsplitter (Rompenubes), Russell Banks, inmigracion irlandesa, raza, clase, America en el siglo XIX, Jonathan Swift, Una modesta Proposicion, Los Viajes de Gulliver.

In his satire, Jonathan Swift identifies and redresses what twentieth-century critical theorists name the “repression of mimesis” attendant on the advent of modernity. Focusing on A Tale of a Tub , “A Modest Proposal,” and Gulliver’s Travels , this essay shows how Swift exploits the powers of mimesis in order to effect an antidote to the repression of mimesis those satires expose. Invoking Michael Taussig’s analysis of mimesis and alterity, this essay explores how Swift’s disenchantment of modernity’s fiction of its own a-fictionality affirms the power of representation over human bodies, lives, and histories.

Why was eighteenth-century English culture so fascinated with the things its society discarded? Why did Restoration and Augustan writers such as Milton, Dryden, Swift, and Pope describe, catalog, and memorialize the waste matter that their social and political worlds wanted to get rid of--from the theological dregs in Paradise Lost to the excrements in \"The Lady's Dressing Room\" and the corpses of A Journal of the Plague Year? In Making Waste, the first book about refuse and its place in Enlightenment literature and culture, Sophie Gee examines the meaning of waste at the moment when the early modern world was turning modern.

The horrors of the Great Famine (1315-1322), one of the severest catastrophes ever to strike northern Europe, lived on for centuries in the minds of Europeans who recalled tales of widespread hunger, class warfare, epidemic disease, frighteningly high mortality, and unspeakable crimes. Until now, no one has offered a perspective of what daily life was actually like throughout the entire region devastated by this crisis, nor has anyone probed far into its causes. Here, the distinguished historian William Jordan provides the first comprehensive inquiry into the Famine from Ireland to western Poland, from Scandinavia to central France and western Germany. He produces a rich cultural history of medieval community life, drawing his evidence from such sources as meteorological and agricultural records, accounts kept by monasteries providing for the needy, and documentation of military campaigns. Whereas there has been a tendency to describe the food shortages as a result of simply bad weather or else poor economic planning, Jordan sets the stage so that we see the complex interplay of social and environmental factors that caused this particular disaster and allowed it to continue for so long. Jordan begins with a description of medieval northern Europe at its demographic peak around 1300, by which time the region had achieved a sophisticated level of economic integration. He then looks at problems that, when combined with years of inundating rains and brutal winters, gnawed away at economic stability. From animal diseases and harvest failures to volatile prices, class antagonism, and distribution breakdowns brought on by constant war, northern Europeans felt helplessly besieged by acts of an angry God--although a cessation of war and a more equitable distribution of resources might have lessened the severity of the food shortages. Throughout Jordan interweaves vivid historical detail with a sharp analysis of why certain responses to the famine failed. He ultimately shows that while the northern European economy did recover quickly, the Great Famine ushered in a period of social instability that had serious repercussions for generations to come.

This chapter contains sections titled: Samuel Butler Andrew Marvell John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester John Oldham John Dryden

The author traces the history of Harvard University and Yale University from their inception--1636 for Harvard and 1701 for Yale. Although the original mission of Harvard and Yale was to further religious purposes, they quickly became institutions for educating the children of wealthy parents to preserve their privilege, rank, and status in life. A dual system of education evolved in the post-colonial period: One for the children of common people and one for the children of privilege people. The common people attended the town schools and the children of the privileged people attended the Latin grammar school (which earmarked these students to enter college). This dual system of education has perpetuated into the twenty-second century. It is evidenced by college legacies and college donations to Harvard and Yale and to other Ivy League colleges. This college admission policy can be construed as an affirmative-action policy for rich white students, and in turn help the rich and powerful exploit their position and ensure class domination for the next generation.