HONEY, HE SHRUNK THE KIDS: SWIFT AND IRISH WRITING

Authors

  • Declan KIBERD University of Notre Dame, USA. E_mail: Declan.Kiberd.1@nd.edu

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.24193/subbphilo.2018.4.01

Keywords:

Jonathan Swift, Irish writing, children’s literature, fantastic narratives, Gaelic tale, power elite, critique of unreasoning.

Abstract

Honey, He Shrunk the Kids: Swift and Irish Writing. A study about Jonathan Swift as a founder of Anglo-Irish literature and of children’s literature, this paper delves into the “story of the repressed” and is an insight into the painful motivations that make the child-adult relationship an examination of human nature’s darker side of nature. This sub-genre considers the exploit of the defamiliarising effect in the tradition and types common in fairy tales of Gaelic Ireland and shows the Irish writer as a dissident and an upholder of tradition. The probability that his writing is the disclosure of any story’s potentiality is assumed by questing the welded joint of the relativity of all judgments, the extreme self-confidence of those who live at either extreme, the critique of unreasoning, tyranny and absence of rational justification of power systems.

Rezumat. Dragă, a micșorat copiii: Swift și literatura irlandeză. Un studiu despre Jonathan Swift, ca fondator al literaturii anglo-irlandeze si a celei pentru copii, această lucrare sondează “povestea celor reprimați” și discerne adevărata natură a motivațiilor dureroase care fac din relația copil-adult o examinare a părții întunecate a naturii umane. Aceasta variantă sub-generică vizează folosirea efectului defamiliarizării în tipologia și tradiția caracteristică basmelor Irlandei gaelice, și îl indică pe scriitorul irlandez ca deținător al tradiției și ca dizident. Probabilitatea ca scriitura sa să fie un mod de dezvăluire a potențialului oricărei povestiri este asumată de interogarea legăturii strânse dintre relativitatea oricărei forme de judecată, încrederea exagerată în sine a acelora care trăiesc în orice mod extrem de viață, critica lipsei de judecată, a tiraniei și a absenței oricărei justificări a unor astfel de sisteme de putere.

Cuvinte cheie: Jonathan Swift, literatura irlandeză, literatura pentru copii, narațiuni fantastice, povestea gaelică, elita puterii, critica lipsei de judecată.

Author Biography

Declan KIBERD, University of Notre Dame, USA. E_mail: Declan.Kiberd.1@nd.edu

Declan Kiberd is Keough-Naughton Professor of Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame, USA. He was previously Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at University College Dublin. He is a member of the Royal Irish Academy and a former member of the Board of Directors of the Abbey Theatre. He has been a Director of the Yeats International Summer School.  He writes regularly on Irish literature in Times Literary Supplement and The Irish Times. His books include Synge and the Irish Language (1979); Men and Feminism in Modern Literature (1985); Idir Dhá Chultúr (1991); Inventing Ireland (1995); Irish Classics (2000); The Irish Writer and the World (2005); Ulysses and Us (2009). He co-edited (with PJ Mathews) Handbook of the Irish Revival 1891-1922 (2015). His books have won many awards including (in 2012) the Truman capote Award for the best work of criticism in the English language of that year. His latest book, After Ireland. Writing the Nation from Beckett to the Present, was published in 2017 in London by Head of Zeus and in the US in 2018 by Harvard University Press. E_mail: Declan.Kiberd.1@nd.edu

References

Swift, Jonathan. 1812. The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift D. D. Vol. I. New York: William Durrell and Co.

Swift, Jonathan. 1814. The Works of Jonathan Swift D. D. Vol. XVII. Edinburgh: Archibald Constable and Co.

Swift, Jonathan. 1834. The Poetical Works of Jonathan Swift. London: William Pickering.

Swift, Jonathan. 2005. Gulliver’s Travels. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Swift, Jonathan. 2010. Swift’s Irish Writings. Selected Prose and Poetry. Edited by Carole Fabricant and Robert Mahony. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Murphy, William M. 1978. Prodigal Father. The Life of John Butler Yeats. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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Published

2018-12-17

How to Cite

KIBERD, D. (2018). HONEY, HE SHRUNK THE KIDS: SWIFT AND IRISH WRITING. Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Philologia, 63(4), 17–25. https://doi.org/10.24193/subbphilo.2018.4.01

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Articles