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ON PETERSON ON SWIFT

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Jan R. Van Meter  and
Leland D. Peterson
Jan R. Van Meter
Affiliation:
University of Texas
Leland D. Peterson
Affiliation:
Old Dominion University
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Extract

THE recent exchange between Phillip Harth and Leland D. Peterson (PMLA, 84, March 1969, 336–43) over Peterson's reading of Swift's Project for the Advancement of Religion and the Reformation of Manners (1709) has left the issue precisely where it began. In his original article (PMLA, 82, March 1967, 54–63), Peterson presented a new interpretation of Swift's essay which would read as satire what has been long accepted as a direct proposal for political and moral reform. Basically, Peterson's thesis is that the traditional reading of the Project poses a problem for students of Swift since the article … seems to advocate hypocrisy, a vice consistently satirized and anathematized in such works as A Tale of a Tub, An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity, and Gulliver's Travels.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 86 , Issue 5 , October 1971 , pp. 1017 - 1025
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1971

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References

Notes

Note 1 in page 1023 The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1939–63), ii, 47–48. Subsequent references are parenthetical.

Note 2 in page 1023 A Proclamation, For the Encouragement of Piety and Virtue, And For the Preventing and Punishing of Vice, Prophaneness, and Immorality (London, 1702), quoted in Peterson, p. 61.

Note 3 in page 1023 Swift's parodies are unmistakable, e.g., materialism as a suit of clothes in A Tale of a Tub.

Note 4 in page 1023 As Maurice J. Quinlan points out (PMLA, 71, March 1956, 201–12), Swift did in fact try to use the Project to gain favor with both the Archbishop of York and the Queen through Robert Nelson, the well-known and respected non-juror who was also the brother-in-law of Lady Berkeley.

Note 5 in page 1023 See especially Irvin Ehrenpreis, Swift, ii (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1968), 276–97. Ehrenpreis also concludes that the Argument advocates the value of nominalism and hypocrisy over freedom of worship to save the Church of England.

Note 6 in page 1023 This point is made by Harth in his forementioned article but deserves reemphasis and reformulation.

Note 7 in page 1023 I am indebted to Mrs. Lynn Kroupa Veach for her help in writing this article.

Notes

Note 1 in page 1025 “Swift's Project: Tract or Travesty” PMLA, 84 (1969), 336.

Note 2 in page 1025 The Spectator, ed. D. F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), ii, 112 (No. 156:29 Aug. 1711).

Note 3 in page 1025 Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, ed. A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1958), p. 105 (beginning of Section iv).

Note 4 in page 1025 Journal to Stella, ed. Harold Williams, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1948), ii, 527. I have italicized “projector” in this quotation, and have done so (in the interests of brevity and emphasis) in all succeeding quotations where either it or “project,” singular and plural, appear, with the exception of the Bond quotation immediately following. For the ellipsis in the above quotation from the Journal, Williams provided this note: “Swift has blotted out a word which is not in doubt.”

Note 5 in page 1025 Spectator, I, 115.

Note 6 in page 1025 Spectator, iv, 589: No. 581, 16 Aug. 1714.

Note 7 in page 1025 Journal to Stella, ii, 620.

Note 8 in page 1025 Gulliver's Travels, ed. Louis Landa (Boston: Riverside Press, 1960), p. 145.

Note 9 in page 1025 Spectator, I, 115: No. 28, 2 Apr. 1711. Subsequent references to the Spectator papers are parenthetical, and all from the Bond edition.

Note 10 in page 1025 See Maurice J. Quinlan, “Swift's Project for the Advancement of Religion and the Reformation of Manners,” PMLA, 71 (1956), 209–10, and I. Ehrenpreis, Dr. Swift (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967), p. 292. The Ehrenpreis interpretation of Swift's Argument and Project is obfuscation, and a serious blot in a commendable biography.