The Bickerstaff-Partridge Papers

Jonathan Swift

2022年9月 · DigiCat

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In "The Bickerstaff-Partridge Papers," Jonathan Swift employs sharp wit and satirical humor to critique contemporary astrology and credulity in the early 18th century. Written in a series of letters and essays under the pseudonym Isaac Bickerstaff, the work parodies the popular astrology of the time, particularly targeting the astrologer John Partridge. Swift's literary style is characterized by its incisive irony, making incisive commentary on the folly of superstitions and the gullibility of the public, reflective of the broader Enlightenment context that favored reason over mysticism. Jonathan Swift, an influential satirist and writer, was deeply engaged with the intellectual currents of his day, including the burgeoning emphasis on rational thought. His own experiences with false prophecies and the public's infatuation with astrology likely informed his decision to pen these essays. Swift's background in both clerical and literary spheres, combined with his keen observations of societal behaviors, provided him with a unique lens to challenge the absurdities that plagued his contemporaries. This book is recommended for readers interested in the interplay of satire, science, and culture during the Enlightenment. Swift's keen insights and masterful prose not only entertain but invite reflection on the human tendency toward irrational belief, making "The Bickerstaff-Partridge Papers" a perennial study in the balance between skepticism and credulity.

著者について

Apparently doomed to an obscure Anglican parsonage in Laracor, Ireland, even after he had written his anonymous masterpiece, A Tale of a Tub (c.1696), Swift turned a political mission to England from the Irish Protestant clergy into an avenue to prominence as the chief propagandist for the Tory government. His exhilaration at achieving importance in his forties appears engagingly in his Journal to Stella (1710--13), addressed to Esther Johnson, a young protegee for whom Swift felt more warmth than for anyone else in his long life. At the death of Queen Anne and the fall of the Tories in 1714, Swift became dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin. In Ireland, which he considered exile from a life of power and intellectual activity in London, Swift found time to defend his oppressed compatriots, sometimes in such contraband essays as his Drapier's Letters (1724), and sometimes in such short mordant pieces as the famous A Modest Proposal (1729); and there he wrote perhaps the greatest work of his time, Gulliver's Travels (1726). Using his characteristic device of the persona (a developed and sometimes satirized narrator, such as the anonymous hack writer of A Tale of a Tub or Isaac Bickerstaff in Predictions for the Ensuing Year, who exposes an astrologer), Swift created the hero Gulliver, who in the first instance stands for the bluff, decent, average Englishman and in the second, humanity in general. Gulliver is a full and powerful vision of a human being in a world in which violent passions, intellectual pride, and external chaos can degrade him or her---to animalism, in Swift's most horrifying images---but in which humans do have scope to act, guided by the Classical-Christian tradition. Gulliver's Travels has been an immensely successful children's book (although Swift did not care much for children), so widely popular through the world for its imagination, wit, fun, freshness, vigor, and narrative skill that its hero is in many languages a common proper noun. Perhaps as a consequence, its meaning has been the subject of continuing dispute, and its author has been called everything from sentimental to mad. Swift died in Dublin and was buried next to his beloved "Stella."