Britain & Ireland
History and Literature in the Age of Defoe and Swift
By , School of History, University of East Anglia (May 2005)
Sections: Britain & Ireland
Subjects: Literature, Cultural History, History, Political History.
Places: Europe, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Periods: 1000 - 1999, 1600-1699, 1700-1799.
Key Topic: language.
Abstract
This article explores the political and literary culture of the first age of party. The article takes two key themes that arise from recent work on this period: first, the emergence of new roles for the public and second, challenges to the manner in which public debate and discourse operated. It argues both that the public was a fiction and that there was also an ingrained fictional impulse in the nature of partisanship. These phenomena combined to produce expectations of, and anxieties about, partisan fictions, deceptions and misrepresentations. In this context, canonical authors such as Defoe and Swift appear as brilliant representatives of a wider political culture that is rooted in partisanship.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2005.00131.x
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