Jonathan Swift and the millennium of madness : the information age in Swift's A tale of a tub / by Kenneth Craven.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Craven, Kenneth, author.

Series:

Brill's studies in intellectual history ; v. 30.

Brill's studies in intellectual history, 0920-8607 ; volume 30

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Literature and science--Great Britain--History--18th century.

Literature and science.

Information science in literature.

Philosophy in literature.

Great Britain--Intellectual life--18th century.

Great Britain.

Swift, Jonathan, 1667-1745. Tale of a tub.

Swift, Jonathan.

Swift, Jonathan, 1667-1745--Knowledge and learning.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (251 pages) : illustrations.

Place of Publication:

Leiden [Netherlands] ; New York : E.J. Brill, 1992.

Summary:

Casting aside critical shibboleths in place for centuries, Kenneth Craven's Jonathan Swift and the Millennium of Madness proposes a new view of intellectual history. This revisionary study documents Swift's intimate knowledge of seventeenth-century science from Bacon and the Invisible College at Oxford to the Newtonian synthesis within the context of Paracelsian medicine and the chemical-mechanical split. Craven shows that Swift joins the philosophies of a neoplatonic divine order, Epicurean atomism, the Reformation, and scientific millenarianism as permeating his time with millennial myths sure eventually to detonate the sense of composure of individuals and societies. In contradistinction, Swift elucidates links between the humors traditions in medicine and literature, saturnine melancholy and the dreaming god Kronos. He proposes the somber realism of the Kronos myth as providing awareness of the self-imposed restraints on ego needed to preclude the proliferation of modern information systems into trivialization of the human enterprise to meaninglessness. This fresh and exhaustive examination of the Anglo-Irish writer's first masterpiece, A Tale of a Tub (1704) unlocks barriers to seeing the nature of Swift's complex integrity, passion, and literary achievements throughout a career studded with disappointments. Specifically, this study authoritatively reveals the identity of unnamed victims of Swift's satire as the deist John Toland and his republican hero, John Milton, for their advocacy of the Puritan Revolution and regicide; Toland's mentor John Locke and another Lockean disciple, Lord Shaftesbury, who confused happiness and self-interest with delusion and the public weal; and his tormentors in the Church of Ireland, Narcissus Marsh and Peter Browne.

Contents:

Preliminary Material

CHAPTER ONE: KRONOS: THE END OF ALL

CHAPTER TWO: TOLAND: MYSTERIOUS REASON

CHAPTER THREE: MARSH AND BROWNE: ASS AND RIDER

CHAPTER FOUR: MILTON: CONSCIENCE FREE

CHAPTER FIVE: SHAFTESBURY: VIRTUE TRAMPLED

CHAPTER SIX: HARRINGTON: MANY AGAINST THE BALANCE

CHAPTER SEVEN: TEMPLE AND THE SENTINELS OF EDEN

CHAPTER EIGHT: PARACELSUS: ASTRAL CHEMISTRY

CHAPTER NINE: NEWTON: MILLENNIAL MECHANICS

CHAPTER TEN: SWIFT: SATURNINE MELANCHOLY

WORKS CITED

INDEX.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

90-04-24679-7

OCLC:

24907856

Publisher Number:

10.1163/9789004246799 DOI