Annotating the Irish Contexts of Jonathan Swift's Poems

FAIN: FA-56265-11

Stephen Edwin Karian
Mizzou (Milwaukee, WI 53233-2225)

I will research and annotate the Irish contexts of Jonathan Swift's poems for a four-volume edition of his poetry that is part of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift being published by Cambridge University Press. I not only will consult the relevant works of modern scholarship on Ireland in the 1720s and 1730s (when Swift wrote the bulk of his Irish-related poems), but also will research primary printed and manuscript sources to discover topical references to people, places, and events. Doing so will clarify the meaning of individual lines of the poems as well as Swift's purposes for having written them. Because Swift's topical references encompass many fields of knowledge, this research will help produce an edition that will be a major resource for scholars of eighteenth-century literature, history, politics, religion, economics, and culture.