The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift is a specially commissioned collection of essays. Arranged thematically across a range of topics, this volume will deepen and extend the enjoyment and understanding of Jonathan Swift for students and scholars. The thirteen essays explore crucial dimensions of Swift s life and works. As well as ensuring a broad coverage of Swift s writing - including early and later works as well as the better known and the lesser known - the Companion also offers a way into current critical and theoretical issues surrounding the author. Special emphasis is placed on Swift s vexed relationship with the land of his birth, Ireland; and on his place as a political writer in a highly politicised age. The Companion offers a lucid introduction to these and other issues, and raises new questions about Swift and his world. The volume features a detailed chronology and a guide to further reading.

Provides a comprehensive alphabetical reference to the life and work of Jonathan Swift.

Jonathan Swift's satirical masterpiece, Gulliver's Travels, has shocked and delighted readers worldwide since its publication in 1726. At turns a humorous and harrowing indictment of human behaviour, it has been endlessly reinterpreted by critics and adapted across media by other artists. The Cambridge Companion to Gulliver's Travels comprises 17 original chapters by leading scholars, written in a theoretically-informed but accessible style. As well as providing detailed close readings of each part of the narrative, this Companion relates Gulliver's Travels to the political, religious, scientific, colonial, and intellectual debates in which Swift was engaged, and it assesses the form of the book as a novel, travel book, philosophical treatise, and satire. Finally, it explores the Travels' rich and varied afterlives: the controversies it has fuelled, the films and artworks it has inspired, and the enduring need authors have felt to 'write back' to Swift's original, disturbing, and challenging story.

The Cambridge Companion to Willa Cather offers thirteen original essays by leading scholars of a major American modernist novelist. Willa Cather's luminous prose is 'easy' to read yet surprisingly difficult to understand. The essays collected here are theoretically informed but accessibly written and cover the full range of Cather's career, including most of her twelve novels and several of her short stories. The essays situate Cather's work in a broad range of critical, cultural, and literary contexts, and the introduction explores current trends in Cather scholarship as well as the author's place in contemporary culture. With a detailed chronology and a guide to further reading, the volume offers students and teachers a fresh and thorough sense of the author of My Ántonia, The Professor's House, and Death Comes for the Archbishop.

A fresh, accessible and authoritative study that conveys the richness and diversity of Irish poets, their lives and times.

This volume provides essays by twenty-nine leading scholars and critics on the best English poets from Chaucer to Larkin.

In the past twenty years our understanding of the novel's emergence in eighteenth-century Britain has drastically changed. Drawing on new research in social and political history, the twelve contributors to this Companion challenge and refine the traditional view of the novel's origins and purposes. In various ways each seeks to show that the novel is not defined primarily by its realism of representation, but by the new ideological and cultural functions it serves in the emerging modern world of print culture. Sentimental and Gothic fiction and fiction by women are discussed, alongside detailed readings of work by Defoe, Swift, Richardson, Henry Fielding, Sterne, Smollett, and Burney. This multifaceted picture of the novel in its formative decades provides a comprehensive and indispensable guide for students of the eighteenth-century British novel, and its place within the culture of its time.