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New Hibernia Review 7.3 (2003) 148-150



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Jonathan Swift and Popular Culture: Myth, Media, and The Man. By Ann Cline Kelly, 244 pp. New York: Palgrave, 2002. $59.95.

The title of Kelly's book, Jonathan Swift and Popular Culture, along with the word "media" in its subtitle and the Warhol-inspired triptych of Swift on its dust jacket, might lead one to believe that this critical study runs along the same lines as Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield's 1998 Jane Austen in Hollywood. Considering the many forms Gulliver's Travels has taken on television, from animated works to the 1995 NBC miniseries starring Ted Danson, it would not be implausible that someone might write a book devoted to studying Swiftiana in the pop culture of our own times. For better or worse, however—depending on one's tastes—Kelly's is not that book; instead, Kelly frankly tells us in her first sentence, her aim is to analyze "an unheralded aspect of Jonathan Swift's genius," in short, his use of print media "to make himself a legend in his own time" (emphasis added).

Kelly credits Swift with recognizing early on that the reading public, from the most well-educated Augustans to the most minimally educated consumers of Grub Street publications, could be captured and held by scandalous contradictions and titillating mysteries. To this end, argues Kelly, Swift cleverly exploited the criticism waged against his publishing of both learned works and underclass vulgarities; his refusal to marry but public intimacy with several women; his hints at religious apostasy while serving as dean of St. Patrick's; and his identification of himself as both a British writer and Tory propagandist, yet at the same time an anti-British defender of Ireland. Swift, insists Kelly, wrote "for the broadest possible audience...to create an enigmatic and provocative print identity....Strangely reluctant to write like a pious gentleman as befitted his class and vocation, Swift evoked constant criticism of his character that kept him in the public eye. He translated that celebrity into power and glory."

To develop her views, Kelly divides her study into two parts. The first three chapters, refusing the "death of the author," endeavor to prove that Swift's public [End Page 148] image was purposely engineered by Swift himself: "Swift's authorial strategies can be inferred from what he decided to publish and how he chose to characterize himself." The second portion of Jonathan Swift and Popular Culture analyzes each key enigma of Swift's character—his unconventional love life, his madness, his humor and recurring appearances in jestbooks, and his epic status in Irish and English history—in order to illustrate "how successful Swift was in creating a self-replicating print identity destined to live on into the future."

The second half of Jonathan Swift and Popular Culture proves the more engaging portion of Kelly's book. Although the entire work is impeccably researched, lucidly written, and tightly structured, as Kelly repeatedly insists that every poem, every prose tract, every newspaper piece, and Gulliver's Travels itself were penned and printed for the fame and glory that would accrue to their author, it is hard not to ask, Can that really be all that Swift was doing in his publishing life? Her descriptions of Swift paint him as little more than a skillful self-promoter: "Swift saw that in a print-constructed world, texts create authors, not the other way around, and that to become a commanding presence in English culture, he had to create an authorial persona whose works were in demand and whose character was memorable." Kelly describes a Swift obsessed with "the question of how to achieve lasting fame in a world constantly being remade by the media." Hence, Swift took a scattergun approach, publishing in a wide variety of genres to see what would stick. A Tale of a Tub was, on these terms, Swift's first success: "It was new, it was strange, it was going to be controversial." Other successes like this made Swift realize...

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