Swift’s Satires on Modernism: Battlegrounds of Reading and Writing

1. Introduction—The Spider and the Bee: Ancients vs. Moderns and The Battle of the Books
G. Douglas Atkins

2. The World Swift Saw Aborning
G. Douglas Atkins

3. The Priesthood of All Readers: “This Good Had Full as Bad a Consequence”
G. Douglas Atkins

4. Swift and the Modern Personal Essay: A Tale of a Tub and “A Modest Proposal”
G. Douglas Atkins

5. Tripping and Troping, Inside and Out: Surface, Depth, and the “Converting Imagination” in A Tale of a Tub

G. Douglas Atkins

6. “The Physical Act of Worship, Not the Mental Act of Belief or Assent”: Reading An Argument against Abolishing Christianity
G. Douglas Atkins

Keywords: Literature, British and Irish Literature, Christianity, Philosophy, general, Eighteenth-Century Literature, Literary History