| Description |
1 online resource |
| Contents |
List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgements -- List of Abbreviations -- Introduction: Altitudes of Authority -- Meditations and Mechanisms: Swift and Robert Boyle's Occasional Reflections upon Several Subjects -- Sinking the 'Spider's Cittadel': The Battel of the Books and Thomas Burnet's 'Philosophical Romance' of the Earth -- Newtonian Battels with Rising Stars and Wheeling Moons -- Laputian Newtons: Science, the Wood's Halfpence Affair and Gulliver's Travels -- Socinians and Queens: Samuel Clarke and 'Directions for a Birthday Song' |
| Summary |
It is often thought that Jonathan Swift was vehemently opposed to the new science that heralded the beginning of the modern age, but this book interrogates that assumption, bringing new perspectives to his most famous works, and making a case for the intellectual importance of some of his more neglected poems and prose satires. Lynall's study traces the theological, political, and socio-cultural resonances of scientific knowledge in the early eighteenth century, and considers what they can reveal about the growth of Swift's imagination. Taking us to a universe made from clothes, to a place where flowers can talk and men are only trees turned upside down, to an island that hovers high in the clouds, and to a library where a spider predicts how the world will end, the book shows how satire can be an active and unique participant in cultural debates about the methods and purposes of scientific enquiry |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index |
| Notes |
Print version record |
| Subject |
Swift, Jonathan, 1667-1745 -- Knowledge -- Science
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| SUBJECT |
Swift, Jonathan, 1667-1745 fast |
| Subject |
Literature and science -- Great Britain -- History -- 18th century
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LITERARY CRITICISM -- European -- English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh.
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Literature and science
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Science
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Great Britain
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| Genre/Form |
History
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| Form |
Electronic book
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| ISBN |
9781137016966 |
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1137016965 |
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