| Summary: | <p>The thesis is a study of Jonathan Swift’s library and reading, and a literary-critical examination of his art of allusion. Much scholarship on eighteenth-century literature seeks to affirm its formal clarity and decorum, perceiving — particularly in Augustan poetry — a strain for order and scholarly care. The claim of this thesis is that Swift provided an alternative to, and a critique of, these standards in literature, alluding to other texts with the kinds of obliquity, parody, and playful misanthropy which were germane both to his own writing and to satire as a genre. </p>
<p>The introduction examines Swift’s obligations at Marsh’s Library, Dublin, showing how he seems to have capitalised on opportunities to steal books and re-use fragments from them. This opens up a discussion of what constitutes a literary allusion, and how satirists such as Swift are invested at once in unsettling an allusion’s plausibility and expanding its possibilities. Chapter 1 immediately responds to these claims, showing how Swift subjected his scholarly editions of ancient writers to processes of breaking and remaking. It reveals his fondness for scholarly errors and distortions of mythology, and his attraction to areas of pseudo-learning which he could inhabit and parody. Chapter 2 pursues a closely-related argument in relation to Swift’s reading of modern literature, looking at the ways in which Swift ignored or affected ignorance of literature written in his own time: alluding, often, to their opening lines, or to cant phrases. </p>
<p>Chapter 3 shows how Swift’s allusions rejected any concept of literary dependance or gratitude; and depended, instead, on his own mock-tyrannical behaviour. The chapter takes special interest in Swift’s reading of classic accounts of tyranny, suggesting that many of his most eccentric allusions were thinly-veiled parodies of his own unfriendly characteristics. Chapter 4, a study of Swift’s allusions to the King James Bible, builds on this work, and examines the range of allusive practices to which he subjected passages of scripture, situating him in a context of clerical learning in eighteenth-century Dublin, and as a Dean in the Church of Ireland. </p>
<p>The thesis closes with an account of the ‘hint’ in eighteenth-century literature (an important word for an allusion in the period), showing how Swift related to a much wider context of allusive practice. The conclusion examines some of the ways in which Swift himself was alluded to, both in England and Ireland, and suggests that one of his legacies to satire was a species of obscurity that derived its local energies from genuinely acquired forces of erudition. </p>
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