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

G. Douglas Atkins is a Professor of English at the University of Kansas, USA. He is the author or editor of over a dozen books, including Reading T.S. Eliot: 'Four Quartets' and the Journey Towards Understanding; T.S. Eliot and the Essay; On the Familiar Essay: Challenging Academic Orthodoxies; and Literary Paths to Religious Understanding: Essays on Dryden, Pope, Keats, George Eliot, Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and E.B. White. He is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including NEH, the Mellon Foundation, and American Council of Learned Societies; has received several awards for teaching; and was the winner of the Kenyon Review's prize for literary excellence in nonfiction prose.

Introduction: The Spider and the Bee: Ancients vs. Moderns and the Battle of the Books 1. The World Swift Saw Aborning 2. The Priesthood of All Readers:'This good had full as bad a Consequence' 3. Swift and the Modern Personal Essay: A Tale of a Tub and 'A Modest Proposal' 4. Tripping and Troping , Inside and Out:Surface, Depth, and the 'Converting Imagination' in A Tale of a Tub 5. 'The Physical Act of Worship, not the Mental Act of Belief or Assent': Reading An Argument against Abolishing Christianity