Reading Swift: Papers from the Fourth Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift, ed. by Hermann J. Real and Helgard Stover-Leidig (review)

116 collated research into the eighteenth century’s varied and troubled responses to these works demonstrates that this is an authentic perplexity, that the period’s desire for positive norms was at odds with a genre that manifestly refuses to simplify moral and formal complexities. The meticulous research contained in the endnotes to this study is a gold mine for future researchers. The text itself has the characteristic panache and wit we have come to expect from Mr. Weinbrot, especially in his personal performances: ‘‘Pope also supplies a poetic spermicide that arrests conception . . .’’; with regard to Pope’s French reputation, ‘‘Addison paved the chemin.’’ Textual errors are few (only a ‘‘Pisgah site’’ howls mildly). Although this book will not likely curb the voracity of Menippean satire as a genre, it offers a strong model for determining the canon and demands that future discussions proceed with care. Christopher Fanning Queen’s University, Kingston Reading Swift: Papers from the Fourth Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift, ed. Hermann J. Real and Helgard Stöver-Leidig. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2003. Pp. 452. $120. In the fourth volume of the proceedings of the Münster Symposium on Swift, Mr. Real and Ms. Stöver-Leidig gather essays surveying the full breadth of Swift’s life, writings, and legacy—essays about Swift’s place in the contemporary academic canon , about the precise meaning of ‘‘coffee’’ in his correspondence with Vanessa, about the contents of his library and the nature of his annotations both in Latin and English. Here, too, we find compelling historical scholarship about Swift’s popularity among the Stuart Court-in-Exile at Rome, or about the possible training in satire afforded by his time at Trinity College and Dublin in the 1680s. What is most noticeable in this volume, however, is the extent to which Swift, still one of the most canonical of eighteenth-century authors in English literature (according to W. B. Carnochan’s fine essay, ‘‘Swift: The Canon, the Curriculum, and the Marketplace of Scholarship’’), has been recast as a figure of far-reaching ‘‘cultural ’’ significance, one whose works demonstrate close affinities with the popular culture of Dublin beggars, London freak-shows, and rioting Sacheverell mobs. In other words, the earlier image of Swift as a gloomy Tory satirist writing at some distance from Whiggish modernity has become harder to maintain. For one thing, Swift in this volume seems less a representative of textual indeterminacy, as he did in much of the American criticism of the 70s through the 90s, and more the materialist Carole Fabricant describes (Swift’s Landscape, 1982), a historical figure whose poetry reflects the concrete particulars and political relations of its Irish or English settings. The entire volume, in many respects, is about Swift’s landscapes, the series of places and spaces he inhabited. Although this volume has sensitive readings of Swift’s more literary texts (such as Michael DePorte’s subtle treatment of Swift’s lifelong fascination with secrecy in ‘‘Riddles, Mysteries, and Lies: Swift and Secrecy’’), the essay most representative of this turn from theoretical to cultural understandings of Swift is Clive Probyn’s 117 excellent ‘‘‘Convict of lyes is every sign’: Jonathan Swift and the Everyday.’’ ‘‘Outside the cathedral precinct,’’ Mr. Probyn writes, ‘‘Swift was a great, even at times a Rousseau-like solitary walker, a man who knew the streets, the street-life and the street languages of his day.’’ And yet, as Mr. Probyn points out, ‘‘the street is the civic space for much of Swift’s writing, even though Swift himself is not actually at street level.’’ Mr. Probyn’s essay focuses on how, ‘‘in Swift’s secular life, his acquaintance with the everyday, like his relationship with everything else, was marked by an ambiguous response to order, routine, the quotidian, and a characteristic rebellion against forms of constraint.’’ This sets up fascinating readings of Swift’s lesser-known, more everyday texts, such as his Proposal for Giving Badges to the Beggars, or Directions to Servants. These undignified subjects ‘‘are the exponents and the agents of the daily routines which Swift fond attractive and worthy of literariness . . . .’’ In this expansion of the boundaries of the literary to encompass...