Premium
History and Literature in the Age of Defoe and Swift
Author(s) -
Knights Mark
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
history compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.121
H-Index - 1
ISSN - 1478-0542
DOI - 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2005.00131.x
Subject(s) - swift , politics , impulse (physics) , public discourse , context (archaeology) , public opinion , sociology , political science , aesthetics , psychology , history , literature , media studies , law , art , computer science , physics , archaeology , quantum mechanics , programming language
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.