A Study Of Jonathan Swift:In The Context Of Intellectual History

Within the stereotyped image of academia,Jonathan Swift(1667-1745)seems to be a barren subject to research into.And in the west,as the so called theory booming has faded away,those punctuation researches which have been circumambulated around Swift's novel and political texts went down too.Except thant some Swiftian experts reaped some fruits in the profound topics like political identity study and ethnic identity study the Swift study has been in an exhausted yet dormant state.This may be due to the scarce of new materials but the narrowness of study perspective must be a key reason.As a counterpart of western swift study,Chinese academy circle of English literature has been long within the confinement of Gulliver's Travels and other prose texts,and for them it has been a kind of paranoid complex not to include Swift's poetry and nonfictional texts as study materials.This academic prejudice and parochialism made an awkward situation that we have no monograph,not a profound topic study also but some reiterative products.This paper is based on the gains and losses of former studies and takes intellectual history as the perspective,which means it needs to look back at the Enlightenment period when the Whiggish oligarchy thrives and the relationship between the church and the lay is deteriorating,colonial trade and commercialization pace soar up while sub-torrents of social movements have collided with each other.Only after this,could we take a close look at the aesthetic characters of Swift's texts while setting and examining this aesthetic characters in a broader interwoven textile of langue and thoughts.After clean up the academic fruits formed by former studies,and make up the studying perspective in the first chapter,this paper discusses swift's compatible attitude to La Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes.And in the second and the third chapter,this paper stress the complexity of Swift's political and moral attitudes which embodied in his relevant texts.In the fourth chapter,this paper studies in the Gulliver 's Travel,and discusses those outside restraints which affect the novel's inside aesthetic values.During the discussions,this paper would like to muster things often ignored by former studies,which like La Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes,the English deist movement,the Neo-Harringtonism,and the Irish perspective and then fuse them into this study.Then we can inquire into the dynamic relationships between this historical issues and swift's appeals,no matter if they are in politics,religion,culture or in morality.