Jonathan Swift and Popular Culture: Myth, Media, and the Man by Ann Cline Kelly (review)

52 BOOKS BRIEFLY NOTED* ANN CLINE KELLY. Jonathan Swift and Popular Culture: Myth, Media, and the Man. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Pp. xi ⫹ 244. $55. Despite the complex ironies, outrageous self-representations, and offensive subject matter of many if not most of his works beginning with the Tale of a Tub (1704)—or perhaps inanefforttocontain and neutralize them—adominantviewof Swift in the twentieth century regarded him as a staunch and rather humorlessdefender of Anglican orthodoxy, political hierarchies, and literary proprieties. Ms. Kelly effectively presents the overwhelming evidence against the portraitof Swift as a conservative Augustan; rather, she considers Swift both as a producer and a product of popular culture. Three chaptersanalyzeSwift’slifeandwritings, with a chronological account of his authorship of works in popular forms and his construction of his own personae through the medium of print; the following four chapters examine representations of Swift since his death.Thesefocus on Swift as a central character in scandalous romances, as a tragic figure, as a protagonist of humorous jest-books, and as an epic hero. Ms. Kelly argues that in the Tale— which she characterizes as a ‘‘blockbuster ’’—and particularly in the voice of the Tale-teller, Swift ‘‘found himself and saw his future as a writer of provocative popular literature.’’ The emphasis here is on the provocation of Swift and his works as vexing, often scandalous challenges to canons of orthodoxy in politics and culture , with their frequent combinations of humor, irony, aggression, political lev- *Unsigned reviews are by the editors. eling, and attention to products of the body. In addition to creating the distinctiveand powerful personaeimpliedbythe published writings, Swift contributed much to the formation of the myths of Swift, the public figure and celebrity, by acts of omission as well as commission . Thus, he did not respond after 1711 to personal attacks on him by the Whigs; these rather came to provide material for a portrait of him as an idiosyncratic, unpredictable , coarse, but powerful and dangerous threat to the authorities, the well-born, and the wealthy. Ms. Kelly rightly emphasizes not only the oppositional nature of many of the politicalwritings of the 1720s, such as the Drapier’s Letters, but also the ‘‘spectacularly seditious ’’ nature of poems of the 1730s such as ‘‘The Legion Club.’’ She also points out that at times Swift and his friends pushed for extreme forms of adulation of Swift, lobbying for him to receive a gold box from the city of Dublin —the equivalent of the keys to the city—or for the birthday of the Drapier (Swift’s own) to be celebrated like the birthday of a reigning monarch. In the second half of the book, which traces representations of Swift during the two and a half centuries since his death— as a driveling old lunatic misanthrope, as the secret husband of Stella, as the jester and trickster who eludes punishment for his outrages and hoaxes, and as the fierce fighter against English oppression and exploitation of the Irish—Ms. Kelly presents some fascinating material. She shows that interest in the mysteries and contradictions of Swift’s personality may be second only to interest in Shakespeare 53 among writers in English. In discussing representations of Swift in the twentieth century, the book successfully pursues its thesis that Swift himself helped shape his own afterlife. Yet to this reviewerperhaps most compelling are the early chapters with their focus on the works themselves and on Swift’s actions in constructing myths and images of himself: Jonathan Swift and Popular Culture makes a particularly important contribution in showing Swift as a writer in popular forms and media who challenged authorities by leveling political and cultural hierarchies. Frank Palmeri University of Miami NETTA MURRAY GOLDSMITH. Alexander Pope: The Evolution of a Poet. Aldershot, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002. Pp. xiv ⫹ 316. $84.95. A short, resolutely centrist, critical biography based on primary sources, Ms. Goldsmith’s Alexander Pope purports to ‘‘take a relatively new approach to literary biography’’ by applying ‘‘recent research into creativity,’’ primarily Csikszentmihalyi ’s Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (1996). As represented by Ms. Goldsmith , however, the insights of this recent researcharefarfromearthshaking,forexample , Csikszentmihalyi’s stress on ‘‘orginality as...